Student Veterans

After years of being plugged into the military machine, they arrive at the la-la land that is the American university system, feeling like aliens from another planet. In one sense, it’s the ultimate vacation—no drug tests, no ambushes, no prohibitions on porn—no rules. But at the same time, emotional solitude can make it overwhelmingly lonely. No one is there to watch their backs. There is no ready-made family willing to take a bullet on their behalf. Their fellow students will have much to say about foreign policy but little understanding of war itself. Politics? Their friends died; they risked their lives because of politics. But sometimes it’s not even that, sometimes it’s just that they’re all grown-up, they’re older and wiser and have seen more of the world. It all depends.

There is no organized tally of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently attending college, but the federal government—via the Veterans Administration—tracks the number of vets who use the GI Bill to pay for school, and according to VA spokesman Dennis Douglass, there were 420,000 students using the GI Bill in 2006. Of them, 85 percent used the money at two- or four-year colleges and about 4 percent went to graduate school. The rest did some sort of technical or non-academic training, like flight school. While no single experience encompasses this vast group, student veterans have one thing in common: as much as they worked as team in war, they go to college alone.

When Luke Stalcup was discharged in March 2004, his sister was in grad school at the University of California, Berkeley. Fresh from the insular world of the military, he tagged along with her to classes and started turning up at campus events. Two weeks after coming home, he stumbled onto a three-day conference at Berkeley’s journalism school entitled “The Media at War: The U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.” For a guy who’d spent the last fours years defusing roadside bombs for the Army, the tone was rattling. In one instance, he recalled a reporter telling the crowd about an American soldier that had forcefully shoved him away from the scene of a bombing in Iraq. As others listened on the edge of their seats, Luke slunk in his chair. He had earned two Bronze Stars in Iraq with additional “V’s” for valor and thought of himself as one of the good guys. He sure as hell hadn’t spent his time in Iraq shoving around reporters, he later explained, and he didn’t like being equated with terrified grunts. “This is—to the people in this room—me,” he said during an interview, throwing up his hands. “These journalists just [spoke] in this way that’s like: ‘The military is,’ ‘The soldiers are.’” Humiliated, he left. “It’s like being in a room full of people who are all talking about you and they don’t know that you’re there,” he said.

Of course, obscurity has its upsides. At the University of Texas at Austin, Starr Renee-Corbin—an Army Captain and Iraq veteran—claims to be something she never wanted to be: a campus celebrity. “In 2005, I started college and I had a very idealistic view of how it was going to be. I just thought that I would move on, that the Army was just a chapter in my life and my goal was to not let Iraq be this milestone in my life; I didn’t want my life to be defined by ‘Before Iraq’ and ‘After Iraq,’ ” she said. “One thing I wasn’t really mentally prepared for was the protests, the outspoken criticism of the war, the soldiers... Really, it was just constantly in my face when all I really wanted to do was forget about it.” And it wasn’t even that she was against protesting so much as she hated the memories they triggered. In Iraq, she had dreamed so wistfully of civilian life, of Texas, that after so much remembering and wishful thinking, home stopped being associated with anything real. It became a symbol of innocence, the paradise where nothing had been touched by Iraq. “It’s so child-like the way you think,” she laughed, “but it’s really true.”

And when she did finally get back, a Master’s program in Women’s Studies at UT sounded like the perfect way to tune out and start over. But by the time she started school in the fall of 2005, there was no escaping it: Operation Iraqi Freedom was all over CNN and the op-ed pages of the Daily Texan.

Corbin had spent a year in Iraq. Six months into the deployment, she got plucked from her job as a communications planner inside Iraq’s fortified Green Zone to assist the Commanding General of US forces in an area just outside of Baghdad. Desk jockey no more, she tried to ease into her role as combat chauffer. Ambushes and IED’s were par for the course, and with them came funerals—lots of funerals.