KEVIN BLANCHARD’S freshman year at George Washington University was unlike anybody else’s on campus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/education/edlife/vets.html?_r=2&oref;=slogin&oref;=slogin
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By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: October 30, 2008
Crowded classrooms routinely sent him into a panic. Cubicles triggered tunnel vision. He felt alienated from the 18-year-olds around him and their antics. His leg throbbed as he wandered the campus, trying to remember where to go. His concentration whipsawed and the words he read in textbooks slipped easily from his memory, the result of a mild traumatic brain injury.
A charismatic Marine Corps veteran, Mr. Blanchard, 25, could trace his difficulties to Iraq and the summer of 2005, when a Humvee he was riding in detonated a bomb buried under the sand. The blast claimed half his left leg and mangled his right leg. In short order, he endured numerous surgeries, months in a wheelchair, a titanium prosthesis and intermittent swirls of depression and pessimism. Until, as he tells it, he woke up one morning and decided to count his blessings.
College was the first step in his plan to reshape his life. After four years in the Marines, one combat tour in Iraq and a life-changing injury, how tough could it be?
“I thought, I’m so motivated, so intelligent — I am taking on the school,” says Mr. Blanchard, who now leads efforts at George Washington and nationally to bridge the gulf between combat and campus. “It didn’t happen that way at all. I was so lost.”
Few students make their way to campus directly from an outpatient bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as Mr. Blanchard did. But with the passage this summer of a new G.I. Bill that offers a greatly improved package of education benefits, there will be more. When the bill goes into effect, in August 2009, a boom in post-9/11 veterans is expected at colleges and universities across the nation. And unlike the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when few colleges and universities welcomed military veterans, a growing number are taking steps to ease the difficult transition.
Still in its early stages at many institutions, the effort is led in large part by a generation of student veterans who came to view their own struggles to adapt to academic life as dispiriting and unnecessary.
“Some people are talking about it like it’s a movement,” says Derek Blumke, a University of Michigan senior and cofounder and president of Student Veterans of America, an advocacy group formed earlier this year. “A lot of people are returning now and realizing they want to go to college. They are coming back, getting together and wanting to make this happen. People are mobilizing.”
The legislation fueling the movement pays homage to the original G.I. Bill of Rights, which is considered one of the most successful and transformative government programs in history. It ultimately sent 2.2 million veterans to college after World War II and helped five million others acquire trade skills. Rather than come home to sell apples, as many neglected veterans did after World War I, these veterans helped broaden the middle class and democratize universities, which were primarily bastions of the wealthy and well connected.
Few would argue that the impact of the new G.I. Bill, formally the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, will rival that of its prototype, mostly because there are far fewer eligible veterans and the new law is less generous. The original bill paid for public, private and vocational education. This one covers public education for most veterans who served after 9/11 and eases the burden of private tuition. The law also extends many benefits to members of the National Guard and the Reserve, and offers stipends for housing and textbooks. But it does not pay for non-degree vocational training.
Still, the law is viewed both by veterans and colleges as an opportunity to do right by today’s combat-tested troops and mend a relationship that has badly frayed since the antiwar movement of the 1960s. The hope is that new veterans, buffeted by war and a troubled economy, can seize on college as a roadmap to a productive life beyond the military.
“This is the biggest step toward turning the page on what we did after Vietnam,” says Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “We saw the G.I. Bill as a way of attempting to deal with veterans’ reacclimation issues in a more comprehensive way. They are in a safe place there in school, moving forward with their life.”
Mr. Rieckhoff’s group spearheaded efforts to pass the bill, written by Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat and Marine Corps veteran. The bill met strong resistance from John McCain, the senator from Arizona who is now the Republican candidate for president, and from President Bush, who argued that it would prompt service members to choose college over re-enlistment after just three years. But ultimately, it passed handily and was signed into law on June 30.
About 40 percent of the 450,000 veterans in the current program attend community colleges, about the same percentage that attend four-year institutions, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Many do so by choice. Two-year colleges offer flexible class schedules, enroll older students and can feel less intimidating — all important issues to veterans, who are usually older and often married with families. Online programs are popular for the same reasons.
Some veterans, though, say they wind up in community colleges or fail to transfer to a four-year institution by necessity: the cost is simply prohibitive. The new G.I. Bill will change that.
But money isn’t the only hurdle. Veterans, for the most part, do not have an easy time getting into four-year colleges and universities, particularly selective private ones. Boredom or frustration with high school — often accompanied by mediocre transcripts and SAT scores — led many into the military in the first place. But many institutions have failed to make allowances for the soldiers’ special circumstances or to promote themselves as veteran-friendly. For veterans, adapting to civilian life, let alone student life, is difficult. It is not uncommon for a new veteran, particularly one with mental or physical injuries, to feel overwhelmed by the choices and rhythms of college.
ISMAEL VALENZUELA, now 33, hopes one day to study at Columbia University.
Reared in El Paso, Tex., he did a lackluster stint at a community college, then in 1997 moved to New York to study classical guitar at the New School. Despite his passion, he didn’t feel ready to get serious. “A big piece of the puzzle was still missing,” he says.
A patriot, he had long imagined himself in the military. So in 2000, Mr. Valenzuela enlisted in the Marine Corps. Twice he was deployed to Iraq, the first time at the start of the war. The second tour, with the country in the throes of an insurgency, was much rougher. Days were filled with seek-and-destroy missions and searching houses for weapons caches. A buddy died in combat. Explosions and small arms fire were a constant hazard.
Last year he decided to leave the corps, a tough decision. He traveled through Europe for a while and came home ready for college. But he had missed the application deadline for Borough of Manhattan Community College. He was told to reapply later in the year.
Fearing that if he did not begin school right away he would start a downward drift, Mr. Valenzuela asked to speak to the director of admissions. At first the director, Eugenio Barrios, saw in him just another case of procrastination and immaturity. But Mr. Valenzuela brought up his seven-year career in the corps, and showed pictures of a banged-up Humvee in Iraq. The vehicle had flipped in an accident, a common danger, and Mr. Valenzuela had been knocked unconscious for 10 minutes. He had shaken off the daze and gone right back to work.
The two men shared a rapport, and Dr. Barrios agreed to become the veteran’s mentor.
Mr. Valenzuela did not do so well on the placement exam in reading, writing and math required by the City University of New York. That did not surprise him, because the day of the test he had trouble focusing and remembering facts, perhaps a product of both post-traumatic stress disorder and a mild traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Barrios was quick to tell him that to succeed he would need to apply everything he learned in the corps to his schoolwork.
“Some need more help than others because their academic beginnings were not as strong,” Dr. Barrios says of veterans. “They bring a certain level of maturity and a certain appreciation of our system. Their desire is there. There is a word in Spanish for that: las ganas. They have that very strong will to want to succeed.”
Mr. Valenzuela’s return from war has not been entirely smooth or entirely unusual. In the months after he left the corps, he became easily enraged, got into fights and drank two 12-packs of Heineken a night, he says. He felt adrift and apathetic. That slowly began to change after he started college, in January. With the help of his psychiatrist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, his new girlfriend and Dr. Barrios, he has wrestled down some of his mental health problems. Talking about the war was the first step in a long process.
“I have gotten a lot better,” he says. “I have been pampered right now by the V.A. and the school. They have been perfect, more than perfect.”
Academically, he has struggled. He studies three times as hard as many other students, he says, but makes progress every day. He is passing all his classes this term, though he failed math over the summer. His goal is to study astronomy and engineering, then return to the Marine Corps as a pilot.
Academically, he has struggled. He studies three times as hard as many other students, he says, but makes progress every day. He is passing all his classes this term, though he failed math over the summer. His goal is to study astronomy and engineering, then return to the Marine Corps as a pilot.
“I can see why it would be hard to follow through,” says Mr. Valenzuela, an unyielding optimist now. “I don’t know how many times I just want to throw the books. But I am super-motivated. That is one of the things keeping me sane.”
Still, old habits die hard, even in the classroom.
“I always know where the exit is, how many windows there are and,” he says with a smile, “what’s the weapon of choice.”
SHORTLY after Mr. Valenzuela first showed up for class at the community college’s lower Manhattan complex, Aubrey Arcangel sought him out. Mr. Arcangel is president of the student veterans club, and he wanted to make sure Mr. Valenzuela was doing all right. It was a protective gesture not so very different from the code the military lives by.
New veterans step into college life from a highly structured system and are bedeviled by the looseness they find. How to start a day without a schedule, one that usually begins with physical training? Mr. Arcangel, 26, who left the Army after four years and one tour in Iraq, explains: “You have P.T. formation, then you have P.T., then you have another formation and blah blah blah. There is a procedure for everything, a field manual, a technical manual for everything.”
Then there are the other students, many of whom arrive right from high school. By and large, fellow students have welcomed veterans, although they do sometimes display a morbid — some former Marines say inappropriate — curiosity about life on the ground in Iraq. The discomfort many veterans mention has less to do with any antiwar attitudes than with the students’ maturity level and remove from the war. With fewer than 2.7 million in the armed forces — roughly 2 percent of Americans 18 to 49 — young people know little about the military, how it works and what it is like to fight in a war.
For Mr. Arcangel, Iraq, where he provided security for a lieutenant colonel, has been difficult to shake off. “If I were back there, I think I would go insane,” he says. “It seemed almost surreal.”
That is one reason he became a student leader, working to hook veterans up with one another in a social network. “There are some veterans that are socially awkward and this helps,” he says. At Borough of Manhattan Community College, fewer than 1 percent of enrolled students are veterans — 160 of more than 19,000 students.
Channeling the warrior mentality into textbooks and tests can be especially trying for combat veterans.
John Schupp, a chemistry professor at Cleveland State University, which has about 340 former servicemen and women among its 15,000 students, saw the difficulties firsthand and sold his university on the idea of vets-only courses. Fall semester, first-year vets can take four introductory courses — English, math, biology and “Introduction to College Life” — and in the spring, psychology, chemistry, sociology and one course in the mainstream to ease them into the civilian world.
“I had to recruit students from the community to get enough in the spring,” he says. “They didn’t just show up on campus. I reached out to the military mom groups. I met with them on a weekly basis.” Last semester, the program’s first, he recruited 14 freshmen. “Once I got the first 14, they were spokespersons.” This semester there are 25 new students in the program.
Mr. Schupp sees camaraderie in the classroom as crucial to getting the veterans to show up, to stay and to thrive. “They tell me over and over they wouldn’t have come to college otherwise,” he says. “In the military world it’s the team. The squadron must survive. When you come to school it’s all personal — my books, my grade, my stuff, my notes. They’re isolated, because other students haven’t seen what they’ve seen.”
The University of California, Berkeley, a hotbed of antiwar protest during the Vietnam War, offers a class called “Veterans in Higher Education,” to help them learn how to prepare for tests and maximize study time. The class is part of Troops to College, an initiative begun in 2006 and championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to attract veterans to California state colleges and universities and make them feel at home on campus.
And at the University of Michigan, with 90 students receiving G.I. benefits, a veterans services office has been set up to help with paperwork and particulars of the G.I. Bill, to walk new students through course registration and to help them find housing. Such offices can assist members of the service or veterans in gathering lost transcripts before they apply, something not easily done from Iraq, or see to it that veterans have access to counseling, in some cases without having to wait in a roomful of other students. Veterans suffering from combat stress don’t always cope well with crowded rooms.
DESPITE the steps to attract these students, Mr. Blumke of the Student Veterans of America says many in the military view the best universities as off limits, even for the academically qualified.
Mr. Blumke, now 27, had a grade point average of 1.5 when he graduated from high school in Alanson, Mich. The 3.9 G.P.A. he earned in a community college and, he believes, his standing in the military got him into the University of Michigan last year. (Michigan State University rejected him.) He is double-majoring in psychology and political science.
His friends thought he was overshooting when he applied. “Veterans for far too long have been pigeonholed” as only community college material, says Mr. Blumke, a former noncommissioned officer in the Air Force. “The Michigans, U.C.L.A.’s and Dartmouths — there is a social stigma attached to those schools. When I told my friends I was going to U. of M., they couldn’t believe it, because of the liberal ideas that they don’t like the military there. They were stuck in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Until recently, universities made little effort to recruit veterans or to alter the misgivings that Mr. Blumke expressed.
Jim Selbe, the assistant vice president for lifelong learning for the American Council on Education, which represents 1,600 colleges and universities, says that just two years ago “a significant gap” existed “between rhetoric and practice.”
“The gap is beginning to steadily diminish,” he says. “There is a deep sense of obligation to do what’s necessary to provide an opportunity for returning veterans.”
Last year, the council started a program to provide individualized college counseling to seriously injured veterans at military hospitals. The program was the brainchild of James Wright, the president of Dartmouth, who has led efforts to bring more veterans to college.
“The all-volunteer military draws in a segment of the population that has not customarily gone to college in the same proportion as other parts of our society,” says Mr. Wright, a former Marine. He hopes the new G.I. Bill “will cause them to raise their aspirations.”
Dartmouth’s admissions office takes military experience into account, Mr. Wright says. He advises veterans to bring their service record to the institution’s attention, perhaps through the essay requirement. Discipline, as well as job and leadership qualities, brings something to the table that cannot be matched by young students. Yet there has to be a sense that the veteran can cope with the demands of the courses. “We don’t look for the same thing in terms of test scores, but we are not doing them any favors,” Mr. Wright emphasizes. “We want to make sure they are prepared and would succeed.”
The number of recent veterans attending Dartmouth is tiny, all matriculating in the last two years. Last year, two became freshmen; this fall there are six in a first-year class of 1,077.
Mr. Blumke recognizes the uphill struggle and has refined his organization’s pitch, which he delivers repeatedly to colleges and universities: “War is not glamorous, but it is reality. We bring that experience to people who don’t know about it.”
That experience ultimately got James McMahon, who served four years in the Marines, into the college of his choice. Mr. McMahon, 23, had nearly given up on attending the University of Rhode Island, his home state school. The admissions office looked at five-year-old SAT scores and poor high school grades (“I didn’t have a vested interest in college”) and was unimpressed. He was rejected.
Mr. McMahon was in California training other Marines for deployment to Iraq, so his father and girlfriend took up the battle, calling the admissions office and sending letters that underscored his successes.
“My father finally got in touch with the president of the university and with his typical Irish charm said, ‘Something might be wrong with the computer system. I’m sure it’s nobody’s fault. But did you just deny a combat veteran with all this experience and a guaranteed $40,000 if he comes to your school?’ ” Two weeks later, an acceptance letter arrived.
Admissions offices, Mr. McMahon says, “are just not wired to think about it in those terms. I didn’t take it as a personal insult. I was more laughing at the university. My friends from high school, they have bachelor degrees from there and these are the same kids I was getting into trouble with four or five years ago.”
An artilleryman, Mr. McMahon is now being tested for a mild traumatic brain injury. He recently cut back on his classes, saying that the injury was making it hard to keep up. But he is majoring in sociology with a focus on criminal justice and has a 3.24 average.
LIKE his fellow veterans, Mr. Blanchard is determined not to let his injuries dictate his future. Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Marine Corps right out of high school, in 2001.
His specialty was combat engineering, because “I wanted to blow stuff up,” he says.
In 2005, he was deployed to Iraq near the Syrian border, where he went on patrols and blew up gates and doors so buildings could be searched. Six months later his Humvee hit the roadside bomb that took half his leg.
After his roommate at Walter Reed was accepted by Georgetown University, Mr. Blanchard decided to aim high himself and apply to George Washington University, which now has about 300 veterans who receive benefits and 200 who do not, a university spokeswoman says.
The two veterans moved into an apartment in Virginia together, and Mr. Blanchard started his first year.
But he didn’t count on his brain playing tricks on him. Although doctors had diagnosed mild traumatic brain injury, he shrugged it off. Compared with losing half a leg and nearly losing his other leg, a slightly shaken-up brain did not register as a concern.
“Whatever,” Mr. Blanchard thought to himself.
Two days into classes, though, he noticed that he was retaining little of what he read or heard in the classroom. “My mind was blurred, cloudy all the time, and I was walking around in a daze,” says Mr. Blanchard, who does not advertise his injuries because he wants no special treatment. “I had a full load and I dropped all my classes except two. And yet I’m studying all the time. It was so frustrating.”
Over time, his brain learned to compensate. “I just started to remember better, adjusting how I think,” says Mr. Blanchard, now a junior studying international business. “It’s still very hard. With classes like regression analysis, I’ll never be the same again,” he says, jokingly.
Although his good leg hurts all the time, he refrains from taking pain medication whenever he can. Instead, he works out at the gym and allows his endorphins to lessen his discomfort, reduce his anxiety and help him concentrate.
He also started a student veterans group, which has put him in touch with about 20 other veterans and has greatly diminished his sense of isolation.
This semester, his grades are average and he is taking a full load of courses, along with added responsibilities as vice president of Student Veterans of America. He ran on a whim in the spring and was voted in. He is setting up a database of services for veterans and working on plans to take his fellow veterans to Walter Reed to help — and urge — wounded service members to go to college. He hopes to collaborate with the university’s hospital on treating student veterans for combat-related problems.
Looking back, he says, it was his injury and the discipline he learned as a Marine that pushed him toward college, a first for his family.
Now that he is here, courtesy of the government, he is not about to squander the opportunity.
“I went through hell and my body shows it,” Mr. Blanchard says. “But I said this is going to be a blessing. I didn’t know how, I just knew it would.”