Why do civilians think I'm aggressive?

The meeting is forty minutes old when somebody finally asks what you think. So you tell them. It takes about eleven seconds and it has a recommendation in it.

The room does a thing. Nobody argues. Later, a perfectly nice person asks if you have a minute, and somewhere in that minute is the word “aggressive.”

You were not angry. You were not even annoyed, which after forty minutes was a personal best. You were being polite in the only dialect of polite you were ever issued, the one where wasting a person’s time is the rude part.

Everybody tells you to civilianize your resume. Nobody mentions your mouth.

In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, fifteen Veterans talked about work after the uniform. They do not agree on whether you should turn it down, hold the line or leave the building. They agree on where the problem starts. Same sentence. Different room.

Where you came from, that was manners

This is not a personality flaw. It is training, and in the Army it is in writing. Army Regulation 25-50 says good writing is understood “in a single rapid reading” and requires the main point at the beginning. It even gives the habit a name: bottom line up front.

Marines carry the same thing without the regulation. In our Marine Corps Birthday special with Tom “Ghost” Martin, a Marine Corps Veteran of Desert Storm, the table laid out what a job is to a Marine: a duty, a time hack, an objective. Simple. Then somebody described the first civilian one.

“You get the civilian sector and it’s like, ‘Slow down, bro.’ I heard that so much.”

Hear it at 32:18

Randy Nichols, a Navy Veteran and electronics technician, got out in 2015 and now teaches at a Las Vegas trade school. Asked how the Navy shaped his teaching, he described the house style.

“Being in the military, it is all just very upfront, blunt, honest, like I say, you do type stuff.”

Hear it at 28:56

I say, you do. Nobody in that system hears it as an insult. It is a courtesy: here is what I need, here is when, go. The civilian version of the same exchange has more steps, and Ureal Irving, a U.S. Army Veteran and founder of Envision Footwear, can recite them.

“In the civilian world, it’s like, well, we need to go down our checklist, and if we don’t make every single point, then we’re in the wrong and then go talk to HR.”

Hear it at 7:40

Nobody out here is in your chain of command

Caitlin Duffy, a U.S. Army Veteran and 50 cal gunner who is now a VA loan specialist, led troops and then led civilians, and says the second job was the hard one.

“I think the biggest struggle that I had with the transition from military to civilian life was the employment and the leadership style.”

Hear it at 33:07

Leading civilians, she says, is like herding cats. Nobody was being difficult. Nobody had been to the same school.

It runs the other way too. A civilian boss who decides to get loud with a Veteran is working from a different scale. Nate Rosas, a U.S. Army Veteran who served in Afghanistan, had a few of those bosses. He says he never laughed in their faces. In his head was another matter.

“You can get tough with me, but I’ve seen tough. You’re not tough.”

Hear it at 20:06

And you do not have to be out to get misread. Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, went from sergeant to ROTC cadet on a scholarship.

“Here I am as an E5 tank commander and now I’m just a cadet being yelled at by senior cadets who have not served a day in the Army.”

Hear it at 7:17

He responded in fluent tank commander. He says the colonel told him he had made quite an impression for a first day.

Then they read your resume

Getting hired is not the wall it used to be. The unemployment rate for Veterans was 3.5 percent in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The trouble starts after the handshake. When Pew Research Center surveyed Veterans in 2019, 42 percent of post-9/11 Veterans who found work said they felt overqualified for their first job out.

Greg Cope White, a Marine Corps Veteran, author of The Pink Marine and TV writer, tells anyone who will listen to hire a Veteran. He also sees how the word lands on some desks.

“Sometimes I feel that Veterans are marginalized, and almost that they’re coming in with a weight on their back instead of a nice platform to stand on.”

Hear it at 33:42

The interview is its own ambush. Most people who enlisted young have never sat for one. Evelyn Pacheco, a U.S. Army Veteran and Nevada’s first Black female union plumber, now prepares women for the trades, and she is specific about what an apprenticeship panel feels like.

“You sit at the table and you’re surrounded by like six, seven people that surround you, and that’s intimidating.”

Hear it at 16:15

Seven strangers deciding what you are from across a table. You have been read by tougher rooms. You have rarely been read by one that knew less about you.

Turn it down, or build your own room

Here is the real argument. Nichols adjusted. Out here, he found, I say, you do gets you a classroom full of people who have stopped listening.

“Out here, you have to take a little more of a gentle approach.”

Hear it at 29:05

Asked for the biggest lesson of two and a half years of teaching, he gave one word: professionalism. Bryant adjusted too. He says he had to learn how to play the game, and then he became the top cadet in the program. Neither man sounds like he lost anything. They sound like people who learned a second language and kept the first.

Jessica Jay Dee, a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and combat Veteran, left in 2014 and went into business for herself. She is done translating.

“If your standards are not being met in the civilian sector or in jobs or in friendships, it is okay to build your own house with those new standards and say, you know what, screw a seat at the table.”

Hear it at 16:18

She says she will fire a client in a heartbeat for being unethical or unreliable. Her house, her standard.

Then there is Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant who spent 20 years in signals intelligence and now works as an athletic trainer. He thinks civilians are taking the blame for something older. He used to tell Marines who were getting out because they hated this and that to expect more of this and that.

“There’s always going to be some kind of issue here and there.”

Hear it at 39:44

Jamie Waterberry, an Air Force Veteran who works in corporate philanthropy, says nearly the same thing more gently. The work, she says, does not change that much. What changes is everything around it: the lunches, the going-aways, the promotions somebody showed up for.

“The fun part of it to me is kind of what’s not there.”

Hear it at 1:15:07

So maybe the coworker who called you aggressive is not the enemy. Maybe the two of you have just never been to the same going-away.

The ones who walked out

Veterans ask each other a blunt question about this: did you leave a good job for your head? We went through our interviews looking for the answer. Nobody on our tape puts it in those words. Five came close, and their first jobs did not last, which is ordinary. In the same Pew survey, 44 percent of post-9/11 Veterans said they stayed in their first job after the military a year or less.

Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran, mortarman and comedy creator, was an infantryman who became a software engineer and then a product manager. Great money, he says. Good family. The whole brochure.

“I like the idea of it, but do I feel like I belong? Is this really where I belong?”

Hear it at 8:11

“I was like, dude, there’s got to be something more to life than this.”

Hear it at 35:00

Late in that interview the corporate world comes up one more time, and the verdict on it runs seven words.

“I can’t do it. It’s a cage.”

Hear it at 49:46

Some of it was the room in the plainest sense. He describes trying to hold an ordinary conversation at work with the hardware humming behind him.

“You hear a server rack buzzing behind you and you’re just like, your head starts just going numb and spinning, and then people start looking at you weird.”

Hear it at 42:40

He would step out for a breather, he says, and know exactly what the room was thinking about him. Misread again, from the other direction.

Rachel Veronica, a U.S. Army Veteran and clinical hypnotherapist, tells it in three sentences.

“I did quit my job in 2020. It’s a very toxic environment that I was in and I just said, I don’t need this. And then I quit.”

Hear it at 8:00

What came next, she says, was the harder question: what am I supposed to do now?

Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy Veteran, actress and firefighter EMT, left the kind of job people move across the country to get. She rode in the Hollywood Christmas parade. She had her own car in it.

“All of those things don’t make up for how soul sucking it is.”

Hear it at 43:08

She went into public service and says she cannot say enough good things about it. Earlier in our interview with her, the usual offer gets put on the table and turned down in the same breath.

“A lot of people are like, ‘You should be making six figures a year with your skill set.’ Cool. But that means I’d also have to wear a collar in order to do it.”

Hear it at 28:37

Tommy Nutzmann, a retired U.S. Navy Chief and creator of After the Uniform, did everything the transition class would have wanted.

“I did the civilian job. I ran a company. I did all this and I was like, ‘Yeah, I hate this.’”

Hear it at 43:55

And Delvin Bourn, a U.S. Army Veteran who jumped with the 82nd Airborne and served in the Gulf War, never took the good job in the first place. He picked his work for what it kept away from him.

“I had a lot of opportunities, but I just wanted to drive a truck. I wanted to be away from people.”

Hear it at 7:39

He drove nights, alone, and says he really enjoyed it.

Haines, who thinks every job comes with something to hate, draws the line in the same place they did. Learn to tell a small problem from a big one. If it is a big one and you cannot live with it, go.

“Just honestly move on for your own sanity.”

Hear it at 40:00

So are you aggressive?

Probably not. You are fast, you are plain, and you were raised by an institution that put the bottom line up front in a regulation. In one room that reads as respect. In another it reads as a threat. The sentence is the same.

What our guests did about it comes down to three moves. Nichols and Bryant learned the second language. Jay Dee built a house where the first one is spoken. Jewell, Veronica, Marshall and Nutzmann decided the room itself was the problem and found the door. None of them says the other two moves are wrong.

Haines would add that the job was always going to annoy you. He is probably right. He usually is. It is very irritating.