While existing research recognizes the importance of transitions in military members' lives, there are few, and to my knowledge no micro-level discourse analytic, studies illuminating how military veterans talk about their transitions into and out of the military. Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach (Gumperz, 1977, 2015), I examine narratives told in interviews by seven student veterans enrolled in an elite liberal arts university about their life decisions, transitions, and community. I employ positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 1990; van Langenhove & Harre, 1999a) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986) and conceptualize the storylines that tellers construct as theories of causation (following Tannen, 2008) that intertextually appeal to master narratives--i.e., culturally and ideologically defined scripts. I identify a multiplicity of storylines and master narratives that emerge in how tellers use specific linguistic strategies, including discourse markers (e.g., Schiffrin, 1987), involvement strategies (Tannen, 2007), negation (e.g., Labov, 1972; Norrick, 2018), paralinguistic cues (e.g., Gumperz, 1982), and pronouns (e.g., Brown & Gilman, 1960). First, my analysis of decision-making narratives regarding military enlistment elucidates how the participants construct various storylines that appeal to master narratives (such as "family-legacy" and "call-to-service"), demonstrate epistemic access (such as to the military, vocational schools, and college), and construct agentive identity. Second, I examine participants' narratives about college application and acceptance, understanding these as discourse units of their life stories (following Linde, 1993). I demonstrate how tellers achieve coherence through the evocation of master narratives, including "military-skills" (among others). Third, I draw on the notion of community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and the idea that such communities can be "imagined" (Cochrane, 2017) to reveal how master narratives, and the storylines that evoke them, capture expectations about the social practices that constitute institutions and environments. Specifically, I show how narrators position themselves as students in their new learning environment and intertextually draw on their previous learning experiences. In addition to contributing to our understanding of decision-making, transition, and community narratives of student veterans, this study lends insight into what constitutes a master narrative and how these are evoked in discourse to construct coherence and meaning. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]