There are a couple of ways you and others who face what you do can go, that I see. You can go for a job that's mostly independent and/or caters to hiring veterans. The inanity and superfluous nature of office life can be a bit too much to take for a lot of vets. It's hard to think that not putting the cover on the TPS reports or who Mary in accounting is banging are important when you've been shot at in some God-forsaken desert.
Boom. You nailed it.
I was active Army 19K (tank crewmen) deployed to Baghdad twice (2006 & 2008). Out battalion was stripped of its tanks and given humvees to support infantry due to their shortage of manpower. At 19 years old I spent 15 minutes pinned down in a humvee as a hail of AK-47 fire pelted the vehicle from 30+ enemies, RPGs exploding as they hit the wall behind me, people screaming on the radios, civilians flipping shit, me trying to return fire. At 21 I saw a carbomb rip through a crowded street market and splatter 20+ civilians having their innards rain down like confetti, I saw my boot camp friend and room mate's dead body carried onto a helicopter after a roadside bomb killed him.
That was all 8-9 years ago. Since then I went to college using the GI Bill.
I now work in a painfully conventional office environment where the other day my "supervisor" gave me a roll of the eyes and an "ugh, I told you you had to email supervisor #2 not supervisor #3 when you completed this task!" It just seemed bizarre to me. Like how could you get so worked up about something so, inconsequential? I couldn't ever imagine letting myself get so stressed out over something so incredibly vapid and shallow. It's hilarious now when I think about it. Just the juxtaposition of myself now vs. just a few years ago. From a world of literally kill or be killed to this polito-corporate-business-cock-sucking-garbage-dump-mindless-whirlpool of pointless self-imposed rules and a delicately unwritten manifesto where everyone of equal position must constantly try to one-up each other in the most passive-aggressive ways.
I do my work in this air-conditioned carpeted non-descript building and I go home. And I am happy now. Don't let the above paragraph contradict this either. Literally nothing gets to me. I write this rambling half-incoherent comment for your own amusement.And I thank all who've managed to read it all.