Matthew Reilly’s roundabout journey to college took a painful, decisive turn after a nighttime crash in Iraq.
In 2008, six months into his first combat tour with the Army, Mr. Reilly and nine soldiers from his platoon were pursuing an insurgent when their armored fighting vehicle slammed into a roadblock. It was 2 o’clock in the morning, and fresh snow blanketed the ground. To avoid detection, the troops had been traveling without lights. Only the driver wore an infrared device to maneuver the hulking, eight-wheeled Stryker through the darkness.
Out of Uniform
As veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pursue college, The Chronicle examines what that means for higher education, the economy, and the students themselves.
Related Story
On a Maryland Campus, Professors Journey From ‘Combat to College’
More From This Series
Veterans Cash In on Post-9/11 GI Bill
The Post-9/11 GI Bill, Explained
Photos
Joey Pulone for The Chronicle
Matthew Reilly, an Army veteran, is studying for a bachelor’s degreein social work and psychology at the U. of Maryland-Baltimore County.
Joey Pulone for The Chronicle
Mr. Reilly plans to graduate next year from the U. of Maryland-Baltimore County. He hopes to attend graduate school and pursue a career in psychotherapy.
Barricades were a common tool of local insurgents. Sometimes the obstructions were explosive. After the crash, soldiers’ shouts of “IED! IED!” filled the vehicle. But they were wrong. There was no bomb.
Mr. Reilly, though, had been riding in the rear hatch as a lookout. On impact, he snapped back, then whipped forward and smacked his head on a gun mount. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, tore his rotator cuff, and, as he now says with clipped efficiency, “demolished” his back. Seven discs from his lower back to the base of his spine were ruptured or herniated. Were it not for a can of grenades that had partially blocked his movements, Mr. Reilly would have severed his spinal cord.
Mr. Reilly, who was serving as a medic, was airlifted to the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Germany. After two weeks there, he was stable enough to fly to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, where he remained for 15 months.
It was during that long convalescence that Mr. Reilly, though he didn’t realize it at the time, got a glimpse of his future career. When he arrived at Walter Reed, he couldn’t stand, walk, or dress himself. Confined to a wheelchair, he was in chronic pain. His family was in New York, and his Army buddies were still in Iraq. He was anxious and overwhelmed.
Yet when other injured soldiers arrived, Mr. Reilly was often the one to talk with them and tell them about the services at the hospital. In a way, he became a social worker. That is what he recalls now, several hard years later, as he pursues a degree in social work and psychology at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. If all goes as planned, he will graduate next spring from the university’s Shady Grove campus.
For many veterans, the prospect of college was a huge incentive to enlist. Since the end of the draft in 1973, tuition assistance and other educational benefits have been effective tools to beckon legions of recruits to an all-volunteer military. That was true for Mr. Reilly, a Brooklyn native, who joined the Army in 2005.
His first foray into college hadn’t worked out so well. After graduating from Townsend Harris High School in Queens, Mr. Reilly enrolled at the State University of New York’s College of Technology at Delhi in 1996. For three semesters, his performance was admittedly lackluster, he says now. He was young, irresponsible, and undisciplined, he says, and what little focus he had went to cultivating a social life.
He dropped out, and for several years, he bounced around New York. In 2005 he was 27, living in Queens, working three jobs—at a medical billing company; as a secretary in the emergency room of a hospital in the Bronx; and behind a bar, pouring drinks—and taking classes at a local university in an attempt to become a nurse practitioner.
The load, he says, was too much. He got nowhere in his studies. Maybe the Army would help him pay for college, he remembers thinking: “It was the entire reason I enlisted.”
‘The Real World’
Mr. Reilly got out of Walter Reed—and the Army—in 2009, able to walk but still hurting. A couple of miles away, here in a suburb of Washington, Montgomery College had a branch campus. He enrolled immediately.
At that time, the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which helps veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars pay for tuition, books, and housing, was brand new and very exciting for servicemembers. But as soldiers “separated” from the Army, says Mr. Reilly, officials provided little practical advice about educational benefits.
The end of service brings an onslaught of details, he says: instructions about returning equipment, disposing of parking permits, and moving out of barracks. GI Bill benefits can get lost in a quickening blur of minutiae.
“It’s death by PowerPoint,” Mr. Reilly says. “It’s the last thing on your list, and you want to get out of there. You just hope you’re awake when the useful information is said.”
So he did some sleuthing and figured out how his benefits would work at Montgomery, a two-year college he revisited this winter to share his experiences. Intent on picking up where he left off in his nurse-practitioner training, he took several general-education courses: sociology, algebra, English, U.S. history. He also got a job at a local hospital. While going through a health clearance, he mentioned his lingering injury from Iraq. Much to the surprise of the burly veteran, the job promptly fell through: Hospital officials told Mr. Reilly he’d be a liability because of his back problems.
Deflated, he tried to come up with another career path. His thoughts turned to his stay at Walter Reed, when incoming soldiers looked to him for help, and he was happy to provide it.
“If I can learn how to do this properly,” he recalls thinking, “this is something I might enjoy as a career.”
Settling on that was easy compared with making the transition back to civilian life. Mr. Reilly, 33, is earnest and genial. But he doesn’t mince words when reflecting on his challenges. As 2009 and 2010 ticked by, he adapted to life as a student. Yet despite his enthusiasm, schoolwork presented new obstacles. Reading was particularly slow and hard because of the brain injury. The painkillers for his back left him doped up and sluggish. So he stopped taking them, turning instead to Eastern medicine and classes in pain psychology to manage the constant discomfort.
Roughly one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffers from a traumatic brain injury; between 20 and 25 percent develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Observers have dubbed both the “invisible injuries” of the conflicts. But many veterans bristle at the notion that PTSD, in particular, is widespread. There’s a difference, they say, between temporary combat-related stress and sustained bouts of the more-severe PTSD.
During his own transition, Mr. Reilly says, his patience was thin—and not just in class. He had little tolerance for the small indignities of ordinary life: cranky customers who gripe about long checkout lines at the grocery store, or broken traffic signs. (For those Mr. Reilly occasionally called his congressman, on speed dial.)
His professors remember him as an intense student who nonetheless had a good-natured, teasing manner with classmates. But Mr. Reilly recalls how he often chafed at the seemingly petty travails of much-younger students—particularly those, he says, that involved malfunctioning, misplaced, or parentally financed smartphones—and he could hardly stand their off-the-cuff comments.
If he had a dollar for every idiotic remark, says Mr. Reilly, he’d be able to quit school and just retire. He names a few: “‘Oh, you’re a veteran, you guys all have PTSD,’ ‘Are you carrying a weapon?’, ‘Did you kill anybody?’”
It’s that last crack that riles him most. “Really?” he says. “I was a medic. You don’t ask me how many lives I’ve saved, just how many I’ve taken?”
Professors sometimes singled him out in class, assuming his political beliefs were conservative. Some instructors danced around the fact that he was a veteran, while others called on him to speak on behalf of veterans everywhere. One simply didn’t realize how his words might resonate when he said, “When you’re out in the real world. ... “
A New Mission
Mr. Reilly’s own short fuse, he says, was as much to blame for the difficult transition. One challenge of going back to school as a veteran, he says, is “being able to recognize our own shortcomings and have patience with people who don’t understand.”
In class and around campus, Mr. Reilly tried to strike a balance between playing down his status as a veteran and talking about it. Part of him wanted simply to blend in. The other part wanted to hang out with fellow veterans, speak up, and help students and professors understand his point of view.
But he was on guard, wary of how people might respond once they learned he had served in uniform.
“You have to watch your verbiage. You have to watch your mannerisms,” he says. “You have to try and read people, because everybody has their own preconceived notions. You’re walking a fine line in terms of what topics are you willing to breach.”
During Mr. Reilly’s last few months at the community college, Esther Schwartz-McKinzie, a professor of English who had grown interested in veterans’ issues, produced a documentary about student veterans there. Since its release last fall, the short film, In Their Own Words, has galvanized many faculty and staff at the three-campus college to step up their efforts to assist veterans.
Mr. Reilly’s ambivalence over speaking up versus blending in is common, Ms. Schwartz-McKinzie says.
“There are a lot of stereotypes about veterans that keep them from coming forward,” she says. “When they’ve left the military, they want to feel like, ‘OK, I’m done with that. I’m starting a new life.’ They might want the support and the connection with other people who’ve had the same experiences, but at the same time they don’t want to be labeled.”
Mr. Reilly is one of a dozen veterans featured in Ms. Schwartz-McKinzie’s film. He has, she says, “a hard edge tempered by a bright mind.”
In the film, he comes off as serious, driven, and honest. In a gravelly voice with a hint of Brooklyn and the no-nonsense tone of a student who has little time to waste, the former Army medic sums up his attitude toward college, ticking off the tasks at hand.
“I have class to go to, I have homework to do, I have reading to do, I have an assignment to do,” he says on screen. “That’s my mission. Those are my goals.”
Last spring Mr. Reilly earned an associate degree from Montgomery College. He is now in his second semester at the University of Maryland, on track to graduate next year. After that? Graduate school. Then, he hopes, a career in psychotherapy, helping veterans.
Correction (4/1/2012, 9 p.m.): This article originally reported an incorrect name for the high school in Queens, N.Y., from which Mr. Reilly graduated. It is Townsend Harris High School, not Thomas Edison High School. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
