The rapid changes the Long Great War (1914-23) brought either confirmed or challenged state authority and its nation-building policies. The war emerged as a new structure and introduced a new, but still contingent, definition of national consciousness and belonging. It also raised the dilemma to those about to be drafted, between accepting or refusing to fight and offered the opportunity to the dominant group to include or exclude individuals and even whole communities from the imagined community. Thus, the war evolved into a test of unity and legitimacy for the state and targeted disproportionately the minority citizen soldiers, questioning their allegiances. In the Ottoman case, the defeat in Sarikamis in 1915 culminated into an anti-Christian radicalism that led to the disarmament of the minority citizen soldiers and the annihilation of the Armenian ones. The latter, combined with the unsatisfactory results of the general mobilization and the high number of casualties and military fugitives, meant that the state desperately needed more men serving underarms. The Ottoman Army had just deprived itself of several actual loyalists and from many skilled citizen soldiers that could fill numerous armed and unarmed positions. The state had gradually hyperpoliticized the war service by linking any active and passive resistance and any suspicion for such to nationalism, its own survival and the idea that only itself can monopolize violence. As a result, the previous contract between minority citizen soldiers and the state was abolished. This causal chain limited any agency the Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers might think they had and forced them to renegotiate a new contract. Based on the understudied collections of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies and on published and unpublished memoirs, diaries, and letters from Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers and expanding from Mehmet Besikci’s (2012) thesis on a tacit contract between the Anatolian Muslim citizen soldiers and the state, I argue that there was a replacement tacit contract between the Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers and the Ottoman and, later, Turkish nationalist authorities. Numerous Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers managed to trade their specialized skills for better working and living conditions. This renegotiated contract meant that they could avoid the harsh conditions of the labor battalions, thus, surviving the war. As they were gradually losing their legal rights under the various exceptional war policies that were implemented, they had to navigate themselves during an era when skills and not human lives mattered.