Veteran in college says "I paid a steep price to have my butt in that seat"

How can most civilians understand any of them if they do not even know what veterans went through in combat? The news stations won't cover any of it, not that the average college aged student would watch much news in the first place. Veterans go back to school with a whole different mindset after combat than they had during high school. When you consider most enter into the military right after high school by the time they serve their time, they enter into college a few years older than other students, but that obvious fact is overshadowed by what they were doing with those years.

I attend Valencia College and I'm a member of the Veterans Council. My husband is a Vietnam Veteran. I thought college life was over when our daughter graduated but the month she was done, I went in. One of the problems this article does not address is that for families, we don't seem to fit in with anyone. We are not really civilian. When you look at the back of a military ID issued to families of disabled veterans, it has "civilian NO" and this allows us to go to military commissaries and get onto bases. We are not veterans, so we don't really belong to them. Wives have no idea what it is like to be gone for a year risking our lives. They only know what it is like to worry about them and do the best they can to take care of what they used to do. In my case, I didn't even do that part. I met my husband over 10 years after he got back from Vietnam, so I don't really fit in with them. There is always a price to pay for membership in any of these groups but the fact is, less than 10% of the population of this nation has a clue about any of this.

While Valencia has veterans attending classes, most of them have the same experience with coming back from combat duty. They can't understand fellow students showing up late for class any more than they can understand assignments not being turned in on time. The attitude of some students bother veterans a great deal when the price of a veteran's education came with putting their lives on the line, as this veteran put it, “I paid a steep price to have my butt in that seat.”

The good thing is that more and more colleges are stepping up to help veterans feel better about their days of learning instead of fighting.

Colleges, VA work to help veterans on campus
By Trevor Hughes - The (Fort Collins,Colo.) Coloradoan
Posted : Monday Apr 11, 2011 21:02:12 EDT
After a four-year stint in the Marines that took him to Iraq and Afghanistan, Michael Dakduk returned home to Las Vegas in 2008, enrolled in the University of Nevada, and got bored.

It wasn’t that Dakduk, now 25, lacked the discipline or drive to succeed in school. But the former sergeant says he found it hard to study calculus or write English papers — and listen to fellow students complain about the workload — when his mind was still replaying what he had seen and been through.

“I’d revert back to thinking about guys getting blown up, getting shot at,” he says, instead of focusing on what he called his “mundane and menial” schoolwork.

As returning veterans struggle to make the transition from military to civilian life on campuses with younger students without their kind of life experience, colleges and universities are increasingly developing programs to address their needs.

“I paid a steep price to have my butt in that seat,” says Matt Randle, 30, a former Army combat medic who is now a senior at the University of Arizona. “I had a keen sense of not fitting in.”

Dakduk graduated in December and now helps other returning veterans as executive director of the Student Veterans of America in Washington. Randle founded and is student-director of the Arizona campus’ Veterans Education and Transition Services office.
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Colleges, VA work to help veterans on campus