While some scholarship has looked at the construction of Egyptian national memory through a state-centered/top-down approach, none has attempted to understand the reception of these historical narratives and whether they actually occupy the collective memory of Egyptians today, nor how Egyptians collectively remember the military’s role in Egypt’s national history. My research begins to fill this much-needed gap and asks the following questions: How do Egyptians’ memory compare to the state’s narrative? Have memories that failed to be documented been forgotten? When they revolted in 2011, what place did the military occupy in their imagination? Has the military(-dominated) regime successfully established legitimacy through its manipulation of collective memory? And what about events they were not present for? For example, in what ways does collective memory align with, complicate, or reject the state’s historical narrative of the October War? And most importantly, how has Egyptians’ lived experience of recent events played a role in shaping the memory of events they did not live through? This paper is structured around two “phases” – encountering the state narrative, and complicating the state narrative. The first examines vehicles of memory used by the state to construct an official history – specifically commemoration sites and practices, popular culture productions, and secondary school textbooks. The key sources analyzed in this section are the October War Panorama and military museums in Cairo and Port Said; films and TV series produced by Synergy, a military-owned/affiliated company that is monopolizing the film industry, including the film El Mamar (2019) and Ramadan TV series Al Ikhtiyar (2020); and the current Grade 9 and Grade 11 history textbooks published by the Ministry of Education. It then draws on oral history interviews with middle and middle-upper class Egyptians of various educational, political, and religious backgrounds to understand the reception of said official narratives and the effectiveness of these vehicles of memory. Drawing further on these interviews, the second phase identifies five themes that capture how these narratives are challenged and complicated by interlocutors in their historical memory: 1. “We wanted to believe it was true”: The Historic Bond between the People and Army 2. “It’s suffocating”: The Armed Forces as Selfless Provider 3. “A diplomatic win at best”: (Capable of) Protecting the Nation Since 1973 4. “Wide roads and empty compounds is not progress”: The Armed Forces as Masters of Development 5. “Maybe for boys who grew up extra spoiled”: A Factory of Men