Much has been written about the Egyptian military as a national institution, its impact on Egyptian national politics, and its place within a wider security establishment. For obvious reasons, however, there has been little scholarly attention on the military as seen from the perspective of ordinary conscripts. Since the Free Officers Revolt in 1952, the Egyptian military has been held in high esteem among Egyptians at large. Within an Egyptian nationalist narrative, the military and its soldiers are widely regarded as the ‘guardians of the nation,’ credited with securing Egypt’s independence, and defending its integrity against both foreign and domestic threats. Since the removal of President Morsi in July 2013, public support for the military has grown even stronger among those who opposed the former president. At the same time, individual military service - compulsory for Egyptian men who have at least one brother - is met with mixed attitudes, and military service means widely different things to men of different background. Young men who firmly support the military as an institution often face their own military service with great dread. Based on fieldwork and extensive interviews with young men in Alexandria, Egypt, this paper will focus on young men who have left the army, and look at how they talk about their own military service in the company of friends and family members. It will be argued that young men talk about their military service in ways that reflect 1) the limits of acceptable opinion within their social environments 2) their own positioning within Egypt’s socio-economic order and political outlook, and 3) how they wish to present themselves, as men, especially in relation to their male peers. The way they talk about their military service, the tasks assigned to them, their interaction with fellow privates as well as officers, will serve as a lens towards young men’s sociopolitical identification and masculine self-presentation. This paper will present the cases of four young men, who offer widely different descriptions and personal reflections on their time in the military. Further on, the accounts presented by these men will be seen in relation to their socio-economic status, religious background, political orientation, and the context in which they are delivered. A special focus will be placed on how these men describe their own actions, and ways of handling social tensions and difficult situations as conscripts in the military.