Journalists Then and Now

The nineteenth-century romantic poet Shelley, on a day when he must have been especially full of himself, proclaimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  Fat chance!  Poets have never exercised much moral authority over the masses, then or now.  Poor Shelley!  He was born too soon, and he responded to the wrong calling.  Journalists, for better or worse, are the moral arbiters of our time. 

            That, as conservatives complain, is a lot of trust and confidence to repose in a group of people who weren’t elected and whose values and concerns supposedly no longer reflect those of mainstream America.  But what’s the alternative?  To trust those in power to tell us “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”   Doesn’t anyone remember Watergate or the disingenuous claims of  progress we got throughout our Vietnam ordeal?   And more recently, it was déjà vu all over again with the Bush administration’s complaints that the so-called “liberal media” were getting it wrong in Iraq.  When we finally throw in the towel on Iraq, be prepared for another stab-in-the-back theory. 

            I am referring, of course, to the point of view--still widely held among neo-cons--that the press misrepresented the situation and undermined our efforts in Vietnam.  The ultimate example of how the press supposedly “got it wrong” is widely held to have been the Tet Offensive of 1968.  The revisionists argue that what the press sensationalized as a disaster and a defeat was actually a victory for our side.  And so it was—but only in the most narrow tactical sense. 

What the revisionists fail to appreciate is how Tet put the lie to the administration’s carefully orchestrated campaign of optimism.  Throughout the fall of 1967, administration spokesmen, General Westmoreland included, had maintained that we were winning and that the enemy was no longer capable of mounting a major offensive.  But, suddenly, at the end of January 1968 the enemy proved resilient enough to mount coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, occupying such high visibility objectives as the Citadel in Hue and, for a time, even the U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon. Our forces weren’t defeated—true enough--but our national leadership was discredited, and that’s worse in a democratic republic. 

            The American public seems to have forgotten that then, as with now, we faced an ever-widening “credibility gap.”  Contrary to popular neo-conservative belief, the press did start off “on the team” in Vietnam.  But, early on, reporters like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam began to notice that the reality of that war didn’t match the official rhetoric.  Obvious defeats were being characterized as victories, and the means we employed were becoming increasingly disproportionate to our professed ends—and ultimately self-defeating.

            Call me a deranged Vietnam vet, if you like, but I’ve always thought that the press did us a great service, and not a disservice, in Vietnam.  The reporters may not have always gotten it right, but in the main, they showed the American public that we didn’t know what we were doing in Vietnam.  If that was “stabbing us in the back,” then I think that what we need are a few more backstabbers today. 

            We especially need such people—independent as opposed to “embedded” journalists—who can look into whether the upcoming “surge” in Afghanistan is really working.  One sign of hope was the Associated Press’s refusal to pull a photo of a mortally wounded Marine.  In making the request, Secretary of Defense Gates, supposedly, was only trying to spare the Marine’s family any unnecessary anguish.  Such was the Bush administration’s excuse for barring photos of the flag-draped aluminum transfer cases coming back from Iraq.  The American public deserves to see the real face of the war they’re being asked to support.  As it now stands, the “embedded” journalists indeed seem to be “in bed” with their units.  We’re seeing and hearing only what the Pentagon wants us to see and hear.  I had hoped for better from the Obama administration. 

            What was good for Bush is good Obama.  We need to know what is really happening behind the scenes?  Where is the independent corroboration of this administration’s claims?

            The irony is that neo-cons are already charging the media with being in bed with the Obama administration—which, of course, is touting victory in Afghanistan as a national imperative.  It is only a matter of time before the media breaks with Obama and Gates over this war.  Up until now, the right has seemed disposed to attack anything Obama supports.  Will people like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Ann Coulter  end up siding with the liberal media over Afghanistan?  War sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. 

 The media, in my view, have become too restrained and too polite.  We are just not seeing the same adversarial, and even confrontational, spirit we used to see in reporters during the Vietnam era.  That was when we just assumed that officialdom couldn’t be fully trusted and had to be vigorously challenged.

As I suggested with my opening, the real danger with a fully re-empowered media is not a matter of bias, one way or another, but rather one of hubris.  Witness, for instance, all the airtime and attention they gave to ABC news correspondent Kimberly Dosier when she was wounded in Iraq.  Would that a wounded Marine or soldier would get half as much attention.  Dosier’s own news organization clearly considered her to be of a higher caste, and therefore more newsworthy, than a mere combatant.  From time to time, journalists perhaps do need to be reminded that they themselves are not the story. 

--Edward F. Palm

Gen. Krulak Sides with Will!

I just learned that former Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Charles "Chuck" Krulak agrees with George Will that our war in Afghanistan is unwinnable.  How is that for credibility?  Of course, it's only a matter of time before Rush Limbaugh and the other neocons add Krulak to the ranks of the "phony soldiers" they lambasted for not supporting the war in Iraq.  I suppose Limbaugh and company have just never met a war they didn't like--despite the fact that they all had better things to do than actually fight in one.

On a personal note, Krulak just redeemed himself in my eyes.  When I was at the Naval Academy (1990-1993), then-Lieutenant General Krulak was putting the pressure on all the Marines assigned to the Academy to recruit more Marine-option midshipmen.  This was at a time when the Corps had more officers than it needed, and competition to get a regular commission was stiff.  Krulak's agenda was clear:  as an alum himself, he was spearheading a move to make the Naval Academy the Corps' premier commissioning source.  It was, to say the least ,a dubious cause--one that seemed to suggest a preference for indoctrination over education.  Maybe I had the guy all wrong.  --EFP
P.S. Here is a link to Krulak's letter to Will:  http://abcnews.go.com/images/ThisWeek/Krulak_letter2.pdf

Terence's Story: A Marine Recruiting Saga

[This is a commentary I almost got to record for NPR's "All Things Considered."  In the end, however, a short-sighted producer killed it because the story couldn't be fact-checked.  I humbly submit that he missed the point.  To borrow a line from A.E. Housman's "Terence, this is stupid stuff," "I tell the tale that I heard told."  That's all.  I have revised the opening and have changed the name--just in case it is indeed true.   --EFP]

As a former enlisted Marine and a retired Marine officer, I am not surprised that the All-volunteer Force has to depend so heavily on the Guard and reserves.  The military has been hard-pressed to meet its recruiting quotas and has been forced to lower its enlistment standards and to offer mercenary-like incentives to get people to sign up in the first place, much less reenlist.  (Would that we had been paid as well in my day!)  It stands to reason that, after years of two inconclusive and increasingly unpopular wars, fewer and fewer people are willing to volunteer. What I am surprised about—and pleasantly so--is that we are not seeing a surge in reports of recruiter misconduct or malfeasance. 

Throughout my career, the two most feared assignments in the Marine Corps, combat duty notwithstanding, were drill instructor and recruiting duty.  Both assignments were fraught with peril—drill instructor duty because of the peer pressure to perpetuate the illegal forms of hazing that made Marine Boot Camp infamous, and recruiting duty because a recruiter’s quota is his or her “mission.”  What this means is that failure to make quota generally resulted in a bad fitness report that could put a period to an otherwise good Marine’s career.  Many a senior noncommissioned officer has put in a hurried leave request upon learning that the interview team charged with selecting D.I.s or recruiters was coming to his or her base. 

            A lot of “sea stories” recounting the horrors of D.I. and recruiting duty live on in popular Marine Corps legend and lore.  But the best one I ever heard probably dates back to that previous 25-year low point--the story of “poor Terence.” 

            Somewhere in a Northeastern city, at a time when we were not even at war, a Marine recruiter was becoming increasingly panicked at the thought that the month was almost up and he had not made his quota.  On that very day, the mother of a developmentally disabled and intellectually challenged young man named “Terence” sent him to the office of some social service agency to buttress their claim for assistance. 

            Unfortunately, the Marine recruiter’s office happened to be on the same floor in the same building as the social service agency Terence was to visit. 

            As I heard the story, Terence’s disabilities were plain to see.  His speech was slurred and limited, and he dragged one foot behind him.  These problems, however, did not deter this hard-pressed recruiter.  That same day, Terence found himself on a bus to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island. 

            The Marine I heard the story from claimed to have been the incredulous series officer, who about a week into the program, was contacted by a social service agency on behalf of Terence’s mother.  When he called the D.I. in whose platoon Terence was listed and asked if he had a recruit fitting his description, the answer was classic:  “Yes sir, Captain, you ought to come down and see this guy.  He’s really weird!” 

            I don’t mean to imply, of course, that abuses of this magnitude happen all the time.  Terence’s story is the extreme, and admittedly, I don’t know how much was true and how much was the sort of exaggeration common to the sea-story genre.  But I don’t doubt that stranger things have happened.  Every one in the Marine Corps is acutely conscious of the fact that, if we don’t have people standing on those yellow footprints painted in front of the Receiving Barracks at Parris Island and San Diego, we won’t have a Marine Corps.  And no one feels that pressure more acutely than the Marines charged with finding the young people to stand on those yellow footprints. 

            I am sure that Army recruiters are just as hard-pressed, and desperate people do sometimes resort to desperate measures.  Hence, should abuses come to light—and there will probably be some—try not to judge the recruiters too harshly.  Most of them, in my experience, would rather be fighting a war than trying to sell it.  

--Edward F. Palm

George Will, and EFP, on Afghanistan

George Will’s recent column on Afghanistan is not to be missed. He makes a cogent case for pulling back from Afghanistan. We are once again trying to prop up an unpopular regime against an ideologically committed group of nationalists, and we’ll never have “world enough and time” (my allusion, not Will's) to succeed. Just as with the Viet Cong of old, the Taliban simply wait us out and return to the villages and towns our troops have supposedly cleared. We’re doomed to fail, Will suggests, because we’ll never be able to field enough troops to “clear and hold,” much less engage in nation-building—the main tenets of counter-insurgency doctrine. Will reminds us that our initial objective in going in to Afghanistan was to kick out al-Qaida, and that objective has been met. Will argues that our main concern should be Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

     I’ve been thinking of late about the essential irony of our current war in Afghanistan. Does anyone else recall that we trained, equipped, and encouraged the Taliban in their struggle against Soviet occupation? Once again, in our Cold-War determination to contain and embarrass the Soviet Union we paid scant attention to the culture and history of the people we were supporting, nor did we give much thought to the long-range implications of their success. As Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner) reminds us in his historic novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, the Soviets insisted on equal opportunity for women. The Taliban put women in burqas and would not allow them to go to school.

--Edward F. Palm

Delaware Revisited

A sense of place has always been a prominent theme in American literature.  Just think of Twain’s Mississippi River, Fitzgerald’s Midwest, Faulkner’s or Flannery O’Connor’s South, Steinbeck’s California, or even Updike’s Pennsylvania and Roth’s Newark, New Jersey.   I suppose it’s natural for a writer to keep revisiting, and even to idealize, the place in which he or she grew up.  But what if you’re from Delaware-- “one of those places,” as a New Yorker friend once characterized it, “you have to go through to get there”?  Up until now, this liability has given me—a sometime writer—as good an excuse as any for not trying to tackle the tough work of fiction. 

Whenever I think of the Delaware I grew up in—during the Fifties and Sixties—I tend to slip into the Rodney Dangerfield mold.  Delaware, up until now, got “no respect.”  Think about it.  Assuming you’re not from Delaware, how many people from Delaware have you ever met?  Delaware is small, but it’s not the smallest state.  Rhode Island claims that distinction.  Delaware does have the distinction of being “the first state,” but only through an accident of proximity and geography.  We were the closest colony to the Continental Convention in Philadelphia, and we had only three delegates, making consensus easy.  Besides, being “the first state” has never netted Delaware any tangible benefits.  The state has fewer than a million people and only two senators and one representative in Congress. 

The Delaware I knew as a kid, moreover, always seemed to be a land of prose and not poetry.  “A river” didn’t “run through it.”  It ran alongside of it—at the time, a somewhat polluted Delaware River.  But a canal did run through it.  The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal divided roughly the northern third of the state from the southern two-thirds.  “North of the Canal,” as we used to say, was a land of suburban tract developments, strip shopping centers, factories, and above all, chemical companies.  “South of the Canal” was a flat tableau of farms and small towns—a place you had to drive through to get to Rehoboth Beach or to Ocean City, Maryland. 

 Then there is the problem of Delaware’s nondescript location.  It’s neither North nor South (and it’s not in New England—a common misconception).  It sits in the middle of the eastern seaboard—the mid-Atlantic region of the country.  There is romance aplenty and there are distinct subcultures associated with the South and with New England and even with the Midwest.  But not with the mid-Atlantic.  Those of us “North of the Canal” lived under the hegemony of Philadelphia and tended to use expressions such as “youse guys.”   Those “South of the Canal” looked to Baltimore, and many shared that distinctive “Charm City” accent.  I suppose we were united by a shared fondness for Maryland blue-claw crabs and Philadelphia-style Italian submarine and steak sandwiches.  But I can’t say that there is a distinctive mid-Atlantic or Delaware culture per se. 

The one dubious distinction we did cling to when I was growing up was being the “chemical capital of the world.”  “Better things for better living through chemistry,” the DuPont Company of my youth used to proclaim.  DuPont was, and still is, headquartered in Wilmington.  Atlas and Hercules Chemical—both major concerns in their own right—were also there.   But the working-class Delaware dream in those days was “to get in with DuPont”--one of the great paternalistic companies that used to promise secure lifelong employment and a good retirement. 

For those of us with no prospects of going to college, the next best thing to DuPont seemed to be a soul-deadening-- but highly paid, union protected--life of monotony on the assembly line at either General Motors or Chrysler—both of which had plants in northern Delaware.   But there was always the military too, and that’s the route I chose in order to escape the life of industrial-strength boredom that seemed to be my legacy were I to stay.
              

Looking back on the fifty-some years since I first left, one thing I’ve learned to appreciate is the ironic truth of a popular song lyric from the Seventies:  “You can travel on 10,000 miles and still stay where you are.”  I have worked my way out to Washington State-- about as far as I could get from Delaware and still be in the contiguous United States.  A year ago, had I challenged people out here to name a famous Delawarean, I’ll bet they couldn’t have done it.  But, now, a Delawarean, Senator Joe Biden, has become the Vice President of the United States.   It’s time to embrace the truth of a self-deprecating joke I’ve often made with friends and acquaintances from other places:  I’m just a simple working-class lad from New Castle, Delaware.   It worked for Joe Biden, and its working for me. 

    

 I think I’ll start that long-put-off Vietnam novel, and the protagonist will be from Delaware.  Maybe my wife and I will even move back there someday.

--Edward F. Palm  (Below, the Washington Street Bridge over the Brandywine River, Wilmington, 1971)

Old Soldiers and the AVF

[Above, please find a "Palm-Print" of Larry Scroggs, one of the very young men I served with in Vietnam.  Am I the only one noticing how many older soldiers--men in their 40s and 50s--have made the casualty lists from Iraq and Afghanistan? Back in the 1980s I had occasion to join other Vietnam veterans in public panel discussions of that original "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." When my turn came to speak, I would try to lighten the mood by suggesting that my fellow middle-aged panelists had to be frauds because all the guys I served with in Vietnam were very young.

In any event, below, I try to explain why I find I find it especially troubling that today's young veterans will never be able to make such a joke. Instead, they're probably already making jokes about how things must be getting dull out at the home.--EFP]


Gen. MacArthur got it wrong. “Old soldiers” don’t “just fade away.” They do indeed die.

On May 10, Army Maj. Steven Hutchison, age 60, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. He holds the dubious distinction of being the oldest service member to die in that conflict, although others have come close. The casualty lists have too often included soldiers in their late forties and in their fifties.

Not to be outdone, the war in Afghanistan, on August 18, claimed 59-year-old First Sgt. Jose San Nicolas Crisostomo. He too fell victim to a roadside bomb, earning the dubious distinction of being the oldest soldier to die in that conflict.

Cynical students of history might see a certain poetic justice in this turn of events. From time immemorial, old men have been fomenting wars that young men have had to fight. But Hutchison and Crisostomo had no part in starting either war. Rather, they were among the few people willing to step forward these days to shoulder the burden of national defense (or national offense, as the case may be). And our willingness to let them—and too many like them—serve in combat speaks volumes about the inadequacy of our All-Volunteer Force. It also speaks to the hypocrisy of a citizenry that publicly venerates the military but is largely indifferent to the manner in which we are overextending and exhausting our troops.

A bit of bad Churchill comes to mind: never have so many asked so much of so few. Personally, as a Vietnam veteran, I am in awe of the current generation of troops. The tour of duty in Vietnam was 12 months for soldiers and 13 months for Marines, and rarely was anyone forced to go twice in the course of a four-year enlistment. Today’s troops--regulars, reservists, and National Guard members alike--have endured repeated combat deployments, sometimes with only a year or less at home before having to deploy again. And their tour of duty is now 15 months. No wonder old soldiers are welcome.

War has traditionally been, and should continue to be, largely the business of the young. This is not to suggest that either Crisostomo or Hutchison failed to measure up. Both were Vietnam veterans, and by all accounts, their maturity and experience were welcome. I submit, however, that they had already done their duty and that it was someone else’s turn to go to war.

It is time for politicians and the public alike to face the bitter truth. If stabilizing the situation in Iraq and winning in Afghanistan are truly national imperatives, we will need more troops—a lot more troops. And that will require reinstating the draft.

I see at least three spin-off benefits from doing so.

First, it would benefit the economy by providing a holding pattern (and even some useful training) for large numbers of young people who would otherwise remain unemployed or under-employed.

Second, it would enable us to field the sort of large decentralized military we once had and which could respond to a natural disaster or a devastating attack—as well as bolstering the local economy wherever bases are established or reopened.

Third, and most important, our national leadership would have to think long and hard before deploying a citizen-soldiery instead of a small professional force.

For my own part, I much prefer the mordant irony associated with my war over MacArthur’s sentimental idealism. I call on Country Joe McDonald, of Woodstock fame, to revise and update his “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” This time, however, Country Joe should mean it in calling on young people to “put down [their] books [or their video game controllers] and pick up a gun.” He will also have to revise his final stanza, this time shaming us all with the call to “be the first one on your block to have [grandpa] come home in a box.”

--Edward F. Palm

From Inside Higher Ed, Sept. 19, 2008

The Veterans Are Coming! The Veterans Are Coming!
By Edward F. Palm

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.
—“Tommy,” Rudyard Kipling, 1892

Picture it: Marine Corps boot camp, Parris Island, summer, circa 1965.

Five weeks into the program, two Marine recruits find themselves on mess duty, assigned to the pot shack, a small detached building out behind the mess hall proper. For the first time since arriving on the island, these two are out from under the watchful eyes of drill instructors and able to talk freely to one another. Up until then, a strict code of silence had been enforced, with recruits allowed to speak only to their drill instructors, and even then, only when spoken to.
As they dutifully scrub a never-ending series of pots large enough to cook missionaries in, they take advantage of their new-found freedom to compare notes about how they are enjoying their stay in this semi-tropical paradise.

“I’m glad I’m going to be out of here next week!” one of the recruits remarks, his voice echoing out from the bottom of the pot he was leaning into.

“Whadaya mean?” the other asks, reminding his comrade in suds that they had three weeks to go until graduation.

“I know, but I’m only 16, and I turned myself in last week. “ [The minimum enlistment age has always been 17, with a parent’s consent; 18-year-olds can enlist with or without a parent’s blessing.] “They said they’d have me out within a couple weeks,” he adds, “in time to begin my senior year back at my old high school.” “I got in so much trouble and was generally such a pain in the ass,” he explains, “that my mother finally offered to lie about my age and sign the papers if I would go in the service. “So that’s what I did.”

“You know,” he admits, “I used to think school was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But when I get back in that classroom, they’re going to have to beat me out with a stick!”
I was the other recruit, the one who was of age and who had no Get-Out-of-Parris-Island-Free card. I’ve often wished I had made a note of that underage recruit’s name and hometown. He was almost a high school drop-out, and I would bet that he went on to become a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or some other sort of professional.

I too would emerge from the Marine Corps reborn as a serious student, but my road to Damascus lasted about four years and included a side trip to Vietnam. As one who has spent a good bit of his subsequent life in academic circles, I have often wished that we could treat many of today’s high-school juniors to summer camp at Parris Island. If nothing else, these campers would certainly come back with the material for wondrous essays on how they spent their summer vacations. But, like my young friend in the pot shack, many would come back with a new-found appreciation for the opportunity to get an education.

Would that it were possible! But the good news is that today’s colleges and universities are soon to enjoy a great influx of academically born-again, highly motivated students. War, as I can personally attest, has a way of reordering ones priorities and values, and today’s veterans will soon have access to the best education benefits available since the World War II GI Bill. This new GI Bill, in fact, is even more generous than its “Good War” predecessor. Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as any veteran who just manages to get discharged honorably, will not only get tuition, fees, books, and a living allowance. They will also be able to transfer their educational benefits to their spouses or children. Either way, we in academe stand to gain. The question is, are we really ready to welcome today’s veterans into our midst?

We do, in fact, have an unfortunate history to overcome. Not everyone in America’s ivory towers was eager to roll out the red carpet for that first wave of government subsidized veterans. The prevailing fear was that the democratization of higher education would inevitably result in the debasement of higher education. Academic standards have indeed slipped since World War II but for a whole host of cultural and societal reasons and not simply as a result of our efforts to accommodate returning GI’s.

By the time I started college in the late ‘60s, the snobbery of the late ‘40s seemed to have been largely forgotten, but some older professors still seemed to feel the need to apologize for their predecessors. My own adviser, for instance, upon learning that I had been in Vietnam, hastened to assure me that he had been very much in favor of welcoming veterans to campus and that he felt we had “a lot to contribute.” His reassurance seemed gratuitous at the time. Vietnam veterans were facing a very different sort of suspicion. We were being repeatedly portrayed in the media as psychologically maimed and socially debilitated and, therefore, potentially dangerous. I cannot say that I directly and knowingly suffered from this stigma, but then again, I stopped volunteering the information that I had been in Vietnam.

Of course, popular support for the military is much stronger now than it was then, and today’s veterans need not fear being viewed as objects of suspicion on campus. Or do they?

I have been concerned recently in finding promotional literature on upcoming symposia that seem to link the need for “Threat Assessment” or “Behavior Intervention” teams with “serving” or “integrating” returning veterans. What next? Should we expect to hear administrators sounding the alarm? “The veterans are coming, the veterans are coming! Lock up the women and the livestock!” Frankly, I worry that this is how certain right-wing critics of academe are going to interpret the linkage of threat assessment and veterans.

In all fairness, I have no doubt that these symposia are worthwhile, and I will take it on faith that the organizers are not viewing a potential influx of veterans as a threat to campus safety and simply want to be prepared to offer non-academic psychological counseling to any veteran who may need and want it. Most faculty and administrators, I would hope, realize that, of all the horrific campus shootings we have heard about in recent years, not one of the perpetrators was a military veteran.

This is not to dispute the need itself. In light of recent events, any campus that does not have an appropriately qualified team poised to intervene in cases of troubling or threatening behavior is putting itself at great risk. But to connect this need to the anticipated influx of veterans could prove to be a public relations nightmare and could actually provoke some of the very behavior we seek to avoid. One of the paradoxes of military history is that countries that have prepared for war have generally gotten it. Individual human nature can be equally paradoxical. People who are unjustly treated as objects of suspicion, out of anger and resentment, sometimes act out in ways that justify that suspicion. But that is the worst case scenario. Rambo was only a figment of novelist David Morrell’s imagination. The great majority of veteran students who feel mistrusted and misjudged will not act our violently; they will simply drop out.

This is likewise not to deny that many of today’s combat veterans suffer from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder or that campuses should not make counseling and other support services available to them. I can personally attest that a little combat goes a long way. But, again, the great majority of PTSD sufferers are not disruptive or violent and should not be viewed as such until or unless they provide reasonable cause. As for offering counseling, the advice of many a wise piano teacher regarding when to start children on lessons would seem to apply here as well: “when they ask for them.”

How then should we view and treat today’s returning veterans? A little sensitivity training may be in order. I am not a psychologist or a counselor myself, but as a veteran, I think I can I can offer five pieces of common sense advice that would go a long way toward striking the right tone as a veteran-friendly school.

First, treat veterans as you would any other student. Do not single them out for special attention. Individualized mailings or special meetings to explain the V.A.’s policies and the school’s certification requirements may be in order, but guard against any suggestion that veterans will need any more special attention than any of today’s students who may or may not be academically or culturally prepared for college. Remember that the average veteran has proven his or her ability to adapt to strange surroundings and to navigate his or her way through a more complicated bureaucracy than the average academic could endure.

Second, do not thank veterans you don’t know for their service. Most people who have served had mixed motives for enlisting in the first place and complicated feelings about the experience of having served, especially in combat. If my own post-Vietnam experience is any indication — and I think it is — it takes many veterans a long time to sort out how they feel about what they’ve been through and whether it was worthwhile — especially if the country remains divided about whether the cause was noble and the war necessary. To thank a veteran you don’t know for his or her service is to put that veteran on the spot. It assumes an ideological and political kinship that may or may not exist. I know it makes me uncomfortable. Keep in mind as well that some will doubt your sincerity, wondering if what you’re really saying is, “I’m glad you went so that I [or my son or daughter] didn’t have to go.” Wait until you know a veteran well — including how he or she really feels about having served — before deciding to offer your thanks.

Third, do not shy away from any political or social issues appropriate to your class. While they may have conformed to military discipline long enough and well enough to earn honorable discharges, veterans are not monolithic in their attitudes, ideals, and values. Expect them to be just as open-minded and diverse in their opinions and viewpoints as any other group of today’s students. Conversely, expect them to resent unfounded assumptions about their politics and personal beliefs.

By the same token, if you have never been in the military, do not assume that you really know what it is like and what it is all about. Even more important, reserve judgment about whether academe really is the superior institution. Having been both a military officer and an academic, I have learned two things: First, academics are no more open-minded than anyone else; they are just better at articulating and defending their prejudices. Second, I have known Marine colonels who are more collegial and collaborative than commanding, and I have known college presidents who are more commanding than collegial and collaborative. Do not approach today’s veterans as “people who were lost and now are found.”

Fourth, when it comes to what they did in the war, don’t ask; wait for them to decide if and when they want to tell. The experience of combat is largely ineffable. It cannot be adequately expressed or shared with people who have not experienced it, and most who have are conflicted about it. If they do choose to share, do not judge. Remember that those who have not been there do not share the same frame of reference. Hemingway had a phrase for it: “a way you’ll never be.” Remember as well that a pretentious moral empathy can be just as infuriating as an uninformed disapproval. In general, veterans prefer to let other veterans do the listening. They know they’ll understand.

Finally, expect veterans to do well. Just as the expectation that someone will behave badly can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, greeting someone with the expectation that he or she will excel can achieve the desired result. That same undergraduate adviser who puzzled me with his patronizing comment about supporting the first G.I. Bill more than redeemed himself later by soliciting my comments in class when we were discussing a story set in a World War II training camp, Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith.” I was able to clarify some of the military practices and customs on which the story turns, and my professor stoked my self-confidence by telling the class that “he speaks from an interesting perspective; he was in the military himself.”

Such made-to-order opportunities to bring a particular student in, admittedly, do not come along every day. And, with older students in general, instructors always need to guard against appearing to be patronizing or condescending. But, in general, we should expect veterans to be as highly motivated and appreciative of getting a second chance at an education as was that underage Marine back in the pot shack.

Edward F. Palm, a Vietnam veteran and a retired Marine officer, is dean of social sciences and humanities at Olympic College, in Bremerton, Washington. The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/09/19/palm.
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