Last fall, Addis received presidential orders to attend a small arms repair seminar in New Orleans. When the date changed at the last minute, it conflicted with a business midterm. He arranged to take the test a week early although he had no time to prepare. His professor offered him no assistance in learning the material and no chance to make up the extra credit assignment when he missed its due date.
“I asked my professor for help,” Addis says. “He said, ‘Just read chapter seven.’ I said, ‘I have your class in three hours, and I have classes until then.’ He just gave me a smile and a nod and said, ‘Good luck.’” Addis ended up with a C-plus, which did not comply with the business school’s requirements and threatened his acceptance into the program.
Because of standards that fluctuate between departments and professors, the VFSA has proposed a new diversity plan and bylaws for the university that would even the field for students balancing school with the armed forces. If the proposal is accepted, student veterans with PTSD will likely receive additional time to complete tests, and the university will consider PTSD a disability, enabling students to receive disability assistance. Professors will also receive a set of guidelines to mediate time conflicts.
The VFSA hopes the university will recognize the inequalities between the rights of student veterans and working veterans. Laws require employers to comply with their employees’ deployment schedule. According to the Uniform Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994, when soldiers return home they must get the same benefits from their employer they would have received if continuously employed during their service. Students, however, have no such protection under current legislation. Addis hopes that by the time he graduates, they will.
“It’s just a stepping stone. But if we miss a week of material, let us work it through,” he says. “Accommodate us so we’re not screwed.”
Art major Ben Mangin served eight years in the infantry, which included service in Kosovo and Iraq. For Mangin, the most challenging part of reentering society was boredom. He immediately realized the pace of what he calls “regular society” withered in comparison to Iraq.
The withdrawals from the adrenaline that Iraq supplied made it impossible for Mangin to sit in a classroom and concentrate, so he waited a term before beginning classes again in spring 2006 — a decision he believes is vital to the success of returning veterans.
“I think that’s the greatest challenge facing combat veterans returning home,” he says. “Life just became incredibly dull. It just doesn’t make your heart pound, when you’re constantly used to this do-or-die situation that’s just go, go, go.”
Above: Pelatt’s finger after it was nearly severed on December 20, 2006 — three months into his tour of duty in Iraq. He received a Purple Heart after the incident. (Photo courtesy Kevin Pelatt).
The transition from combat to classroom requires decompression time, says licensed clinical social worker Gary Hunter. “School is a different kind of stress than the war-zone,” says Hunter, the team leader for the Eugene Vet Center, which offers veterans services that include post-combat counseling. “War is life-and-death at any minute, but there are always people telling you what to do, where to go, how far to go, when to return,” he says.
After eight years of infantry service and a term to decompress, Mangin is now pursuing a career in photography. He considers himself fortunate to have readjusted from combat and found his niche at the university. Kim plans to pursue a master’s in education at the University of Oregon. Addis hopes to embark on a career in business but says he might be deployed again in the meantime.
This February, surgeons inserted three screws and one metal plate into Pelatt’s right hand in order to reassemble the bone in his finger. Shrapnel lies just beneath the skin of his face, cheek, elbow, and bicep — eternal souvenirs of debris from the improvised explosive device (IED) that severed his finger and splattered tendons across his chest.
“It was December 20 at 8:47 a.m.,” he recites instinctively. “I was on patrol, and I was riding in the gun turret.” Pelatt’s upper body paid the price of exposure when a roadside bomb detonated next to his unit’s vehicle. It fractured his nose, cracked his goggles, and sent metal fragments into his, face, arm, bulletproof vest, and helmet. The shrapnel that landed in his cheek and bicep muscle still felt tender four months later. “I watched it go off in my face,” he says. “It threw me backward, and it severed my pointer finger. It was dangling by a vein.”
Despite his inability to fire a weapon, Pelatt wanted to stay in Iraq. “I hoped I would either just lose the finger, or they could fix it and I could stay,” he says. But after four days in a hospital receiving intravenous pain medications and antibiotics — Addis says insurgents typically pack IEDs with highly infectious substances such as feces, dead animal parts, metal fragments, and human and animal hair — and a surgery, a trip to a doctor in Germany, and twenty-nine stitches, Pelatt boarded the thirty-two-hour flight to El Paso.
His thirty-six-hour rotations in thirty-degree Fahrenheit temperatures were done. The fear that his parents and fiancée would receive a phone call and an American flag from the U.S. Army was gone. He was safe.
But Iraq lingered with Pelatt in Texas. “You feel like you’re still in combat,” Pelatt says. “People will think you’re depressed but you’re not. We’re so used to being on guard all the time.” Like Kim, Pelatt suffers from PTSD and “what we call the ten-mile stare. When we look at people, we’re kind of looking through them,” he says. According to Veterans Affairs, at least 20 percent of Iraq veterans return home with “service-related psychological disorders.” And this figure only takes diagnosed instances into account.
Perhaps the majority of civilians will never relate. These student veterans and others like them will probably encounter more unsympathetic professors and, as Mangin says of the stranger who spit on Pelatt, people who “don’t really understand the way the world works.” But they may also encounter the small group of University of Oregon faculty who, once a week, stand in the middle of campus and take turns reading off the names of soldiers who’ve died. The proposed bylaws may pass, and veterans may eventually find they can step out of what Addis calls “the shadows.”
"We’re following our boss, and our boss happens to be the president."
“On campus, you don’t want to mention it so much. It’s just safer to keep your peace,” Addis says. “Really, it’s a simple job that we’re following our boss, and our boss happens to be the president.”
As Pelatt wiped the stranger’s spit from his uniform with his hand, shock paralyzed his speech. He knew the stranger had aimed for his face, and he knew he couldn’t do anything about it. So he walked away. Nine months later, Pelatt’s unit left for Iraq.
Above: Twenty-two-year-old Kevin Pelatt lies in bed after surviving an explosion. (Photo courtesy Kevin Pelatt).
