Student Veterans

Like many Iraq veterans, Corbin now feels torn about the war. Her initial visions of spreading freedom and democracy turned to bitterness when her friends and fellow soldiers started dying. The Iraqis hate us, she often thought, we have no business here. She left Iraq firmly opposed to the war, but now that she’s back in Texas, she can’t bring herself to publicly speak out against the war. “I’m very proud of the anti-war movement because I want it to end and I hate it,” she said angrily. “You know, the latest troop surge—I thought I was going to vomit.” On this point, she paused. But with so many comrades—including her husband—still in Iraq, she explained, “there’s a part of me that wants to believe that my family didn’t sacrifice so much for nothing.” Joining the protesters, she said, would feel like a betrayal of an institution she had so loved.

Iraq vets tend to wax nostalgic about the invasion—those good ole days when the U.S. was spreading freedom, hunting Saddam and building a democracy. Stalcup, the bomb squad sergeant, got out of the Army in early 2004, and he is no exception to the rule. His war—his Iraq—was a good war, a good fight. His job, he explained, was to save people, not kill them.
He reminisced about his first Bronze Star during the battle of Najaf. He had been sitting in a convoy when the truck in front of him exploded. The caravan stopped as dozens of soldiers stepped out of their vehicles. Luke hollered at them, “Nobody move! We’re in a minefield.” The soldiers froze. Luke and another member of the bomb squad lowered themselves gently onto the ground belly-first and began poking through the sand with car antenna-like titanium probes. Every few minutes they would find a mine and pull it up by hand. After several hours, they managed to clear a path out of the minefield.

But when Stalcup applied to UC Berkeley, he says the veterans liaison at the admissions office told him that as a far as the admissions process was concerned, it would have been better if he’d been the president of his high school chess club than have been in the military.

Stalcup was flabbergasted. “I came back thinking ‘Holy Crap, I’m a veteran and I have a really good military record,’ so school’s are just gonnna be like, ‘Oh totally!’” he said. “They say, ‘We’d like you to have world experience and to be international.’ Hello! I’m super-international. I have tons of experience. That was really a hard blow for me.’”

He had wanted a hero’s welcome; what he got was Berkeley, which did admit him. But even they are changing their tune, according to Director of Admissions Walter Robinson. Six months ago, the University of California Regents [board] approved a Memorandum of Understanding to “place a high premium on military veterans” in the admissions process. In January, Berkeley even started a Committee on Veterans Affairs to help university administrators wrap their brains around the student-veteran experience. “I think people are a little more sensitive to the soldiers now” than in the Vietnam era, said Robinson. But, he acknowledged, there is still much room for improvement. “We can’t treat them like we invited a bunch of vegetarians to a barbeque and act like ‘we have nothing for you’...It’s a form of cultural competency. If you’re not familiar with their culture, it’s not going to go well.”

Of course, these realizations came too late for Stalcup, who enrolled in the spring of 2005 and stayed through the summer. He says he felt like a pariah. Professors in some classes openly disparaged the military during lectures, he said. “‘People in the military are all, you know, dumbasses,’” he parodied, “‘and they’re in the military because they couldn’t do anything else.’ ” His frustration rose. “That’s really not good,” he stammered.