COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
The Soldier and the Student
Aaron Glantz, The Nation
November 27, 2007
"Join the military and go to college." That's what the recruiters say.
But the deal that today's servicemen and servicewomen get is a far
cry from what their fathers and grandfathers got. When President
Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law in the waning days of
World War II, he saw it as part of his New Deal program. The law,
officially called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, promised
returning veterans that the government would pay the full cost of
tuition and books at any public or private college or job-training
program. It also provided unemployment insurance and loans to buy
homes and start businesses.
By contrast, the current Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, asks
active duty members to accept a pay reduction of $100 per month
through twelve months of military service. When they return to
school, they receive $1,100 monthly for a maximum of three years of
education benefits. It's an amount that doesn't come close to
covering the cost of a modern college education, but it does help
some veterans--if they can get through the red tape.
In July 2005, 23-year-old Paris Lee was honorably discharged after
serving almost three years in the Army. A native of California's
rural, picturesque North Coast where the old-growth redwoods grow, he
returned home and enrolled in a free ten-week college prep program
called Veterans Upward Bound at Humboldt State University. Lee was
preparing to attend Humboldt State in the fall, but this past May he
received a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs denying his
application for the GI Bill. "They said I'm not eligible because I
served thirty-five months and two days in the Army," he told me.
"Normally you have to serve thirty-six months to get education
benefits, so they're trying to deny me based on twenty-eight days."
After the VA rejected Lee's application for GI benefits, he sent an
appeal letter to the VA regional office in Muskogee, Oklahoma. While
he waits for the response, the Army veteran works dealing cards for
blackjack, Pai Gow and Texas hold 'em games at Blue Lake Indian
Casino east of Arcata.
According to the VA, those seeking to activate their GI Bill benefits
must fill out a twelve-page form, which is eventually submitted to
the college or university of choice. It's not uncommon for a veteran
to receive letters requesting more information, and VA questions must
be answered to the department's satisfaction. A notice of eligibility
usually takes four to eight weeks.
With an application process like that, it's little wonder that,
according to the Department of Education, veterans are much less
likely to graduate from college than students who have never served
in the military. The department's most recent data show just 3
percent of veterans who entered a four-year college program in 1995
graduated by 2001, compared with a 30 percent overall graduation rate.
Another reason for that gap is the military experience itself. The
Pentagon sells an educational dream to recruits. In addition to
promising tens of thousands of dollars for a service member's college
education, recruiters promise future soldiers that they'll be able to
"attend college anywhere they are based and even in the combat zone
through Internet classes offered from the college they are enrolled in."
But most Iraq War veterans say that's a promise that exists only on
paper. They say it's difficult to study in the military--especiall y
in combat zones. Take 23-year-old Alejandro Rocha. The Los Angeles
native joined the military in 2002. After graduating from high
school, he had started to drift, and when his father's hours got cut
from his job in a pen factory, Rocha dropped out of community college
and took a minimum-wage job loading and unloading merchandise at
Macy's. "I wanted to escape," he told me. "The money wasn't good, and
I said to myself, I can't just be doing this my whole life. So I
joined the Marine Corps. They sent me on three tours in Iraq." Rocha
was assigned to an infantry unit and spent most of his five-year
commitment either in Iraq or in training. After taking part in the
initial invasion in 2003, he was called back for the brutal siege of
Falluja in November 2004 (more than 100 Americans and 4,000 Iraqis
died in that battle). In 2005, he was back in Falluja.
"I don't know how they expect us to take classes in Iraq," he said.
"Maybe some people can. Maybe some people have desk jobs, but I was a
machine-gunner. I manned Humvees and rolled around in Humvees,
patrolling. Sometimes we went house to house...door by door and
knocking down doors. When we were back in the US, we were just
training and training. It wasn't really part of my job to study."
A different set of issues confronts America's "weekend warriors,"
members of the National Guard and Reserve. As of June there were
about 90,000 US military reservists enrolled in college, and about
25,000 of them have been deployed at least once to Iraq or
Afghanistan. Juggling school and military service isn't easy. Just
ask Marine Corps reservist Todd Bowers. He was halfway through a
degree in Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University when
the Pentagon pulled him out of school and sent him on two combat
tours to Iraq. On October 17, 2004, Bowers was shot in the face while
patrolling the outskirts of Falluja. A sniper's round had penetrated
the scope Bowers was using and sent fragments into the left side of
his face. When he returned, he found his student loans had been sent
to collection.
"I had notified my lenders that I was leaving on a combat
deployment," he said. "Something went awry while I was gone, and
[when I returned] I had tremendous amounts of letters saying, You owe
this money." Eventually, Bowers said, he was able to get the
difficulty resolved, "but the damage had already been done, and my
credit history was ruined."
Under federal law, there are no protections guaranteeing that a
school must accommodate a student/soldier who's been deployed.
Universities and colleges are not required to readmit students when
they return from overseas or to refund tuition for soldiers pulled
out mid-semester- -and they are even allowed to flunk students if
they're not attending classes because they've been sent to Iraq.
Bowers dropped out of school. He works as government affairs director
for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the first and
largest member-organization for US veterans of recent wars. In June
IAVA persuaded Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego) and Senator
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to introduce a bill called the VETS Act, which
would require colleges to refund tuition for service members sent
overseas, cap student loan interest payments at 6 percent while the
students are deployed and extend the period of time during which
student/soldiers may re-enroll after returning from abroad. Veterans
groups are optimistic about the bill's chances for passage; but like
most legislation geared toward veterans, Congressional leaders have
put it on the back burner while they argue about how and whether to
fight the Iraq War.
Other, more ambitious efforts appear to be headed for much less
success. In January, newly elected Democratic Senator James Webb of
Virginia (one of a handful of Congress members to have a son or
daughter serving in Iraq), introduced legislation to create a new GI
Bill called the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act that
would provide college tuition, room and board and a $1,000 monthly
stipend to veterans who have served at least two years of active duty
since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Webb noted that the benefits in his
bill essentially mirror the widely popular benefits allowed under the
nation's original GI bill. According to a 1986 Congressional Research
Office study, each dollar invested in the World War II GI Bill
yielded $5 to $12 in tax revenues, the result of increased taxes paid
by veterans who achieved higher incomes made possible by a college
education. "That bill helped spark economic growth and expansion for
a whole generation of Americans," Webb told Congress. "As the
post-World War II experience so clearly indicated, better educated
veterans have higher income levels, which in the long run will
increase tax revenues."
Unfortunately, Webb's colleagues didn't share his enthusiasm for
veterans' education. The Bush Administration quickly declared its
opposition to the bill, warning it would cost tens of billions of
dollars and would prove cumbersome to administer. Republican senators
agreed, and the bill has not made it out of committee.
In short, the government's approach is not to benefit veterans, but
to make the benefits of service seem attractive to soldiers when they
enlist, while extracting as little money as possible from the federal
Treasury. Today's GI Bill is not so much a ticket to college but a
recruiting tool that can be used to persuade skeptical young people
to join the military.
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