For Former Servicemen, An Ivy League Outpost

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Boston Globe
June 7, 2008
Pg. 1
Dartmouth embraces, learns from war vets
By Irene Sege, Globe Staff
HANOVER, N.H. - On Nov. 9, 2004, three hours before Samuel Crist suffered the gunshot wounds that would reroute his life to the Ivy League, a photojournalist caught the Marine carrying a rocket launcher under a cloud of white phosphorus during the Battle of Fallujah. By the time the picture appeared in The New York Times the next morning, one bullet had torn through Crist's right arm, a second had lodged in his left leg, and a comrade was dead.
Within days, Crist arrived at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he met James Wright, Dartmouth College president and a former Marine, and began an improbable journey to Dartmouth. Crist's classmate Brendan Hart, another former Marine steered to Dartmouth via Wright's efforts, enrolled so weakened by an adverse reaction to his mandatory smallpox vaccination that he needed a wheelchair to traverse the campus.
Crist and Hart just finished their first year as Dartmouth students; Crist still thinking daily of Iraq and Hart on medical leave from school since March. They are the face of Wright's campaign - through visits to military hospitals, a program he established at the American Council on Education that is helping 200 seriously wounded veterans continue their education and his lobbying for GI benefits - to encourage returning veterans to go back to school, whether to community colleges, elite institutions such as Dartmouth, or anything in between.
Dartmouth has pushed them to appreciate the power of their minds, and they, in turn, have provided quiet examples of service and sacrifice on this campus of 4,100 undergraduates. They are creating a community of veterans and, as the spring term comes to an end, raising the public profile of veterans and their concerns.
"When President Wright was saying that a place like this wants a guy like me, it was something I had never even considered," Crist says. "Going from military to civilian life is a difficult transition, and the whole academic world is pretty scary for military guys."
Neither Crist, an indifferent student who attended four high schools, nor Hart, a B student with no honors or advanced-placement courses, would have been admitted to Dartmouth at 18. Crist came after writing to Wright from Houston, where he moved after a year at Bethesda. Hart, treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, came through Wright's ACE program. They are transfer students - Crist from Houston's University of St. Thomas, Hart from the University of Maryland - using veterans' rehabilitation benefits for college. They see in Wright a role model much as Wright sees himself reflected in them.
"The worst thing we could do is bring somebody who wasn't ready to work at this level," says Wright, who served in the military from 1957 to 1960. "I'm not unsympathetic. I was not a very good student. I enlisted in the Marines when I was 17. I didn't take school seriously until after I got out."
Crist, a Middle Eastern history major learning Arabic, and Hart, a founding member of Student Veterans of America, season their ambition with the mission of proving what veterans can achieve.
"I look at my time at Dartmouth," says Hart, "as an opportunity to present a modern-day veteran who's succeeding."
Says Crist: "I didn't want to graduate from this place having everyone think that the only reason why I was successful here was because President Wright wanted to get this program up and running and would do anything to have successful veterans here. That's not the case. Ever since I got here everything has been in my own hands."
A meeting of East and West
Crist, a soft-spoken Louisiana native, barely noticed the brilliant New England autumn because he was so engrossed in his books, so motivated by his experiences in Iraq.
"I was exposed to a culture that was completely foreign," Crist says. "We're having interactions with this culture under the worst possible circumstances, and that's a problem, because we both have to share this world. The West and the East. It's one of the reasons why I'm studying their culture and their language."
At 23, Crist feels too old to pursue the social scene on fraternity row. He is earning A's and A-minuses.
"I'm surprised by how well I'm doing here. It's given me the confidence to push myself even harder," Crist says. "Most of the students here are very naturally talented. I think the strongest asset I bring to the academics is the discipline."
Members of Crist's Arabic class know that his two bracelets memorialize fallen friends. "It brings the war to the forefront," says Katie Pine. The edge of Crist's US Marine Corps tattoo peeks from beneath his T-shirt sleeve, and whenever he walks shirtless to the shower, his dorm mates surely notice the tattoo covering his back: the motto "Death before dishonor" and an image of an M-16 and combat boots.
"People in the military at a very young age volunteer for something that they know is potentially dangerous, potentially lethal, and basically it's for an ideology.
"You're saying I'm going to do what my country needs regardless of what they ask," Crist says. The dog tag chain in Crist's dresser also holds the bullet removed from his leg. That leg remains susceptible to cramps, and he cannot throw a baseball with his injured arm. Five men in Crist's platoon died in Iraq. Nightmares occasionally disrupt his sleep. "I take academics seriously," he says, "but if I fail a test it's not the end of the world."
For the veterans
Despite the publicity Wright has received for helping wounded veterans pursue their education, for much of the year the veterans' presence at Dartmouth was subdued. "I wish I had met them," says freshman Erin Jaeger, "because I think they bring a really interesting perspective."
Crist's sole extracurricular activity is serving as president of the nascent Dartmouth Undergraduate Veterans Association. When he and Hart - and former Marine Greg Agron, who deployed twice to Iraq before applying here because his sister-in-law attends Dartmouth - matriculated, the number of undergraduate veterans jumped from two to five. Together with five who served in other countries, they formed the organization in February.
Only in recent weeks has the veterans association taken a more public stage. Its members sometimes attend World Affairs Council meetings, where junior Tina Praprotnik appreciates their viewpoint. "I think about the war, but I can definitely feel the distance, the disconnect," she says. "Most of our friends are not the ones who would be there."
To press for the expanded GI bill subsequently approved by the US Senate, the veterans association collected the signatures of 250 students. Native Americans at Dartmouth invited them to present flags at their May powwow. Next fall, the veteran association plans to welcome seven new undergraduate US veterans and to sleep outdoors to protest the plight of homeless veterans.
Memorial Day at Dartmouth is usually only a chance to study for exams. This year, the association hosted a barbecue of hot dogs and hamburgers that, Crist reports, attracted 20 veterans, from MBA students to cafeteria workers. At sunset they lowered the flag on the campus green while a trumpeter played taps.
"It could just as easily have been me who didn't come home instead of my friends," Crist says.
"We've lived very different lives, and our lives are converging at college. Just as it's important to understand people with other backgrounds, we're as important and deserving of recognition and understanding."
Up for the challenge
Absent from these events was Hart. Before arriving at Dartmouth and cofounding the veterans association, he successfully pushed the University of Maryland to increase services for its veterans and to honor them at a football game. Hart hopes he is well enough to travel to Washington next week for the national conference of Student Veterans of America, of which he is director of finance and operations.
"The misconception about the infantry Marine is that he's the guy who can't go to school or has nothing else going on, so he decides to carry a pack and a gun. That's not the case at all," Hart says.
Hart, 26, majors in American history. "At Dartmouth, it's an academic immersion. You're always challenging each other. Some of the best experiences I've had have been outside the classroom," he says. "I'm a lot older than my classmates, but I still appreciate learning from them, and I hope they can understand the life that I've lived."
Since going on medical leave, Hart has lived in the New York borough of Manhattan in his mother's former apartment, where he put a magnet on the refrigerator that reads "Never, never, never give up." He has suffered auto-immune ailments since going into anaphylactic shock after being inoculated in 2005 in anticipation of deploying to the Middle East. His unit previously provided security at Guantanamo Bay. Hart accompanied them to Bahrain, only to be evacuated.
"The vaccination," he says, "started with my respiratory system when I went into shock, then moved into my immune system, and has subsequently moved into my skeletal system and has also affected my brain."
Hart sometimes spends days or weeks in bed. He expects to return to Dartmouth next fall. "I can't wait to go back," Hart says. "It's a real test of my willpower to make sure that I beat this and it doesn't beat me."
 
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