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Returning soldiers struggle to adjust
back to normal lives on college campuses
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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Lying on the hood of the Humvee he
used as his bed for much of the war, Brandon Nordhoff would put on
his earphones, turn up the volume on his Discman to drown out
battlefield noises, and imagine himself at a party back on the
Indiana University campus.
After one such dream, Nordhoff determined when he returned to
campus, he would pledge a fraternity and make up for the social
life he lost while deployed with his Indianapolis-based Marine
reserve unit.
He has made up for lost time with his social life, but for Nordhoff
and many of the thousands of Iraq war veterans, the transition from
war zone to campus has not gone smoothly. They acknowledge they
struggle to mend war wounds, mental and physical, while trying to
readjust to the relative triviality of life as a student.
As the oldest pledge in this year’s Acacia fraternity class,
Nordhoff, 21, often feels awkward. Partying while many of his
Marine buddies are still in Iraq now seems frivolous. And the
occasional war protest on campus can make him furious.
“Going to war changes you,” said the corporal, a junior
from Kirksville, Ind., a small farming community near Bloomington.
“I feel 200 percent different than the people in Bloomington
and a lot of the kids at the university.”
In the first few weeks of the school year, Veterans Affairs
officers at campuses throughout the Midwest have reported being
inundated with soldier-students looking for help collecting their
education benefits under the Montgomery GI Bill.
The officers can help them straighten out their benefits, but
universities have no one designated to help the soldiers with the
transition from battlefield to classroom.
Although the Iraq war has not generated the unrest on campuses the
Vietnam War brought in the 1960s and 1970s, divided opinion on the
current conflict is obvious. Some returning soldiers complain their
classmates and professors often have a shallow view of the war and
they do not show enough support for the troops.
“Inevitably in classes, you have these kids who criticize the
war and criticize the president and don’t know what
they’re talking about,” said Cpl. Daniel Rhodes, a
Marine reservist from La Grange, Ill., and a senior in political
science at the University of Illinois in Champaign. “I want
to say to them, ‘Do you realize that you’re sitting
here in a classroom, living freely, because we’re willing to
fight?’”
Other veterans have returned to campus with doubts about the
necessity of the war in Iraq. From lectures in his Chinese history
class about how emperors sold war to their people, to a local
business’ toy-soldier display representing Americans who have
died in combat, Bradley Rehak, a senior at the University of Iowa,
said he is constantly reminded of the war.
“We can say that we got rid of a terrible dictator by going
to war,” said Rehak, 24, a medic with the Iowa National
Guard. “The argument misses the far greater points that we
haven’t found that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and we haven’t found links between al-Qaida and
Iraq.”
Aamer Madhani
Chicago Tribune
