From the intro to a story in The New York Times Nov. 2:.Keven Blanchard’s (pictured) freshman year at George Washington University was unlike anybody else’s on campus.
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 co-founder 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 eterans 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 ebb, 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.
