>>283187441 (OP)
In a job involving combat 27 is old and experienced.
There's been a pretty big societal change where a lot of people aren't even familiar with what used to be a pretty default path for boys when it came to career. Enter into something intense fully at age 18 (or even earlier), which usually meant leaving home behind. Do that for a decade or so and then retire in your mid 20's and usually come back home, if you were lucky, with enough money that you didn't have to work anymore (at least for a while).
Military careers are like this, but so could many other jobs like working on commercial ships like cruises or fishing vessels, oil rigs, mining, logging (forestry), hard labor at some particularly juicy job site that paid well for a big long-term project, even apprenticing at a kitchen to become a chef etc. This is used to be very common. In that kind of life 27 meant you were at the end of your path and likely had already initiated and trained multiple cohorts of younger people into the same position as you. War films, the good accurate ones, are like this, the seasoned veteran in charge is just someone who's 25, while everyone else is 19.
There's a whole slice of the economy that is insane intense jobs that are 95% done exclusively by men aged 18-25 and it used to be way more common for boys to just jump into that mill willingly and become "old" at age 27 because their usefulness ran out, but in exchange they got pretty good money.
