Between the 1980s and 1990s, the Peruvian State recruited around one million1 adolescents and young men between 16 and 23 years of age through the Compulsory Military Service to turn them into soldiers of its Armed Forces and fight with them the subversion promoted by the terrorist organizations Sendero Luminoso and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement against the democratic system, a bloody period of violence known militarily as the "Counter-Subversive Struggle" or "Counter-Terrorist War". The "leva", then - a "forced" and "discriminatory" recruitment procedure - focused its attention on the most vulnerable rural population of the country, mostly of indigenous origin and language, illiterate and extremely poor (Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos 1998) (Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos 1998) (Defensoría del Pueblo 2002). This was the social base with which the State organized its defense, achieved victory and pacification of the country towards the end of the nineties, leaving as a human toll the death of 22,378,000 Peruvians, 20,000 disappeared, in sum more than 182,000 victims of human rights violations (Ministry of Justice - Reparations Council - Single Registry of Victims 2013). But in addition, a "lost generation" of about half a million Peruvian ex-combatants, mostly belonging to the Army, of whom about a thousand were killed, more than five hundred were disabled and thousands subsist today in day with severe mental health disorders as a result of the war, succumbed to abandonment, poverty and oblivion. In Peru, there are still no studies that have pondered the political role of former FFAA troop soldiers who survived the recent internal war, that is, research that has acutely examined the level of participation and influence of these thousands of war veterans in the current public sphere, and more broadly, in the country's political agenda. However, 18 years after the end of the conflict, three episodes of national importance have highlighted their participation in the country's political life. The emergence of civil associations - militarized and self-managed - of former combatants "Heroes of Pacification" and "Defenders of Democracy" - i.e. not "official" - organized throughout the Peruvian territory, from which they declare their struggle before the State for the vindication of their rights as "war veterans". The leadership assumed by former combatants in the most violent socio-environmental conflicts in defense of their indigenous territories against neoliberal extractivist policies: "Bagua" (2009), "Conga" (2012) and "Tia Maria" (2015). And finally, the organizational level and decisive political support that the former combatants demonstrated in the electoral processes of 2006 and 2011 to make possible the candidacy and election of former President Ollanta Humala Tasso, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, former combatant, leader of the Peruvian Nationalist Party and founder of the Ethnocacerist Movement. Why do the former defenders of the State stand up today against the State itself? What is the explanation for this paradox? Is there a relationship between the experience of the militarization processes that the indigenous populations endured through military service during the internal war and their behavior and political activism in the present? Is it possible that the militarization experienced during the internal war has given rise to the emergence of new forms of military nationalism in the Peruvian post-war period? For more than six years these questions have motivated the present research. Therefore, we will rehearse and pose here some preliminary ideas and reflections raised from the initial finding of historical sources and ethnographic record made in the field, fundamentally interviews and visual representations during the events carried out by members of the National Confederation of Armed Forces Graduates, the Regional Federation of Graduates of Page 3 of 24 Ayacucho, the Association of Disabled by the Action of Arms, among others, between 2012 to the present2 We propose, in the light of the discourses and forms of political representation of the current leaders of the associations of ex-combatant soldiers of the Army of the "Counterterrorist War", the emergence of a new form of militarized citizenship, i.e. "citizen-soldiers" who sustain the exercise of their citizenship on the basis of military nationalism learned in the Army barracks and its politicization during and after the internal war in which they fought. Thus, the discourse of ex-combatant soldiers of the Army is characterized by two fundamental and no less complex ideas. First, the juxtaposition of nationalist, heroic and dissident discourse that they promote as "defenders of democracy and the pacification of the country" and second, in their self-definition as "exemplary citizens with authority" to watch over the State and the governments, actively participating in the political life of the country.