The voices of veteran students largely go unheard in composition classrooms, due both to a cultural mismatch and to the inability of scholars and teachers to hear veterans voices. Building a broad profile of student veterans reveals a deep ideological divide between military and academic culture. Veterans are faced with an unpalatable choiceto choose between competing and contradictory identities, abandoning one for the other. Modifying Maillouxs conceptual tool of enactment history to open up the possibility of veteran students entering into academic discourse without having to abandon their own identities, we make possible the reality of a stronger veteran presence within the humanities in general, and composition in particular, without violently stripping them of their identities.