SALUTING SERVICE

In honor of Veterans Day, university administrators, students, faculty and staff came together to honor Vietnam and student veterans yesterday at the Memorial Chapel, sharing tales of war and musings of peace.

"To truly understand [war], you have to talk to the ones who were there," Director of Operations and Maintenance and Vietnam veteran Jack Baker said. "There is no one who wants peace more than the men and women who serve in uniform."

The Memorial Chapel, which was originally built to honor the veterans of World wars I and II, has a long history of serving veterans, Chapel Coordinator Megan Dillard-Miller said.

"A major thing we try to accomplish is bringing the veteran community together," Dillard-Miller said.

At the close of the ceremony, veterans old and young made their way out of the chapel to lay carnations on the Vietnam Memorial - a small plaque and bench on the south chapel lawn - as a symbol of thanks and understanding, while bagpipes wailed and 1,000 tiny American flags placed in the front lawn of the chapel waved in the wind.

"As a campus, we want to recognize the service veterans perform for our nation," university President Dan Mote said in a speech at the ceremony, noting there are more than 580 veterans at the university. "You have our deep and everlasting gratitude for your service."

In addition to yesterday's events, the university has made strides toward bettering its veteran outreach and support programs. This semester the university formed the Veterans Program Office and the student group Terp Vets. It has also established Veterans Week, a week-long string of events honoring veterans of the past as well as the many university students in uniform.

For student veterans, entering college was like entering a world more foreign than the most remote regions of Iraq.

"You come back and everything is different," business graduate student and Navy veteran Steven Olivera said. "Your entire life gets put on freeze, and things that may have been routine before you left, like just sitting on the couch and watching T.V., become a different world."

Because so many student veterans said readjusting to a college social life was a major hurdle they faced, Terp Vets was formed to help student veterans connect with other students in a social context, while also providing an environment of people who understand where they are coming from, said senior kinesiology major Laurissa Flowers, who is an Army veteran and the president of Terp Vets.

"There's going to be such an influx of vets coming back from overseas to college in coming years," Flowers said. "There needs to be something in place for them when they get here. They need to feel like they have a place where they can belong."

Although they sometimes feel outside the college-student culture, student veterans said they understand war's ability to define a generation better than most.

"This is our generation's war," sophomore aerospace engineering major and Air Force veteran Natalie Jones said. "I wanted to be involved. I didn't just want to sit on the sidelines and watch, I wanted to do something."

But being so in tune with the realities of war can also isolate them from the rest of their generation, they said.

"We had Facebook over [in Iraq], and I saw all my friends going out to other countries or bars and stuff," sophomore criminology and criminal justice major and Army veteran Andrew Creveling said. "And there I was, sitting in a sandbox. It's just weird."

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