Student Veterans

As alienating as it might be, the post-war homecoming for today’s veterans is a far cry from what their Vietnam forebearers had to endure. As Warner explained—and this sentiment was echoed by everyone interviewed for this story—“I’d say over 90 percent of [the students] are very respectful.” His biggest complaint was with a deleted-then-revived-again Facebook group entitled, “F**k the Troops.” But more recent Facebook searches reveal many more groups with names like, “Anyone who says ‘F**k the Troops’ is a COMMIE bastard!!!” and “F**k the troops!...they’re horny and they need something to screw!” than those with genuinely anti-military agendas. The real problem isn’t persecution; it’s loneliness. When you’ve invaded Iraq and hunted Al-Qaeda in the Afghan Himalayas and now you’re a college student, it’s hard not to feel like—and be seen as—a monkey in the zoo.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been introduced as a Marine at Madison at a party,” Warner admitted, “without someone inappropriately asking, ‘Hey, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but I’m really curious: Have you killed someone?’ ” He has, in fact. During the assault on Nasiriyah, Warner and fifteen other Marines were chest-deep in a latrine when a car stuffed with armed Iraqis came speeding at them. Jake raised his rifle and took aim. “I didn’t think about ‘I’m taking a life here,’ or anything like that,” Warner chuckled. “It was more like, ‘OK, 300 down range, so I gotta range up 3 inches; winds off to my left, you know, so I gotta go right a half inch for every hundred yards…’” He paused for second. “I took the shot,” he volunteered, sounding matter-of-fact. “It hit the driver, they swerved off the side of the bridge. That’s what happened.”

As a young Marine, he had looked forward to this moment as a right of passage. “As much as some people won’t want to admit it,” he explained, “they’ll respect someone more who’s killed someone in combat…It gives them a more powerful, mysterious aura.”

But that was the Marines. College is different. A different “mysterious aura” surrounds him at Madison. The other students at Madison might ask, but they don’t understand. As he put it, “they don’t actually want to know what happens over there.” They’ve never been Marines—or anything close—so it’s even hard for them to understand the mindset of where he comes from, of where this kind of thing is normal. He sighed, “it gets old real quick, let me tell ya.”

Drinking, he confessed, makes it worse. “I’ll be at a party or a bar or something. I won’t have any Marines or anybody that went to Iraq or Afghanistan with me. I’ll want to call one of my buddies and talk to them, you know, not even about the war, but just to bullshit with them. Just someone I can relate with,” he explained. “And I’ve got nothing. I’ve partied before and I’m just like ‘I’m not feeling this right now’ and I’ll just head back and go to sleep because I don’t want to get in that real deep, depressive mood where no one can understand.”