Pitt student veterans double with new GI Bill

Sophomore Dan Johnson thinks some of the skills from his last job translate easily to his… Sophomore Dan Johnson thinks some of the skills from his last job translate easily to his economics major. Firing mortars, after all, involves plenty of calculations.

And until he retired from active duty in 2009, that was much of what the 25-year-old did. Working as a weapons sergeant for the U.S. Special Forces, he traveled much of Southeast Asia and, along with a small team, went to help train other countries’ militaries to better protect themselves.

Now he has returned to the U.S. to attend school for something of a career — and culture — shift. Johnson, like other veterans at Pitt, comes to school years older than his counterparts, and with more travel in his background than most.

“My main goal was never to travel. I’m extremely grateful and all that, and I wouldn’t give up those experiences,” he said. “Still, staying in one place is alright.”

As of the spring semester, Johnson was one of more than 500 students attending Pitt with government support through the GI Bill, which subsidizes the education of veterans, said Ann Rairigh, the director of Pitt’s Office of Veterans Services. The highest level of benefits — full in-state tuition — requires three years of active duty. Rairigh said that it isn’t a government handout.

“That’s a lot of your life to sacrifice to the military,” she said.

The number of veterans receiving government benefits at Pitt has doubled from about 200 in the past two years since Pitt created Rairigh’s office and the new GI Bill went into effect. The bill also allows veterans to pass along their benefits to their spouses or children’s educations.

Many of the veterans live with another shadow of their military career — the possibility of being called back into duty. Quite a few of the Pitt students studying under the GI Bill are still in the reserves or National Guard and could still be deployed abroad.

Rairigh said that many of the veterans have had multiple deployments, sometimes while at school. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have affected hundreds of thousands of young Americans, many of whom have returned to seek education at home. Her office works with them to help with classwork when they receive their orders. If they get deployed early in the semester, or are enrolled in certain classes that cannot be completed once the soldier comes back, the soldiers might have to withdraw for a year or more.

“In some classes they might be able to make up the work, but if it’s something like a chemistry lab, there’s no shot,” she said. “Some students will be here 10 years trying to get a degree because of multiple deployments.”

She said that the academic constraints are not so different from those experienced by many other nontraditional students who balance family lives, children, careers or all three while going to school. Most other nontraditional students, though, don’t have careers that can take them to the far corners of the world on a few weeks’ notice.

“Deployments don’t come at the end of the term,” she said, noting that because of the several months’ preparation and standing down necessary after deployment, students can miss much more than a year of class.

For some, however, their army days are not yet over. Maj. Patrick Hofmann has been in the army for 15 years, since enlisting in 1996. A student at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Hofmann is working on a master’s in Public and International Affairs, majoring in security and intelligence studies.

His studies at Pitt are not so much of a change as they are a break. Once he graduates from Pitt, he’ll go to an army school in Kansas for more training before he continues work as an intelligence officer.

Since receiving his commission in 2003 — he graduated from the University of Tampa with a degree in political science — Hofmann has worked in Belgium; South Korea; Washington, D.C.; Kansas, and on one deployment to Iraq. Luckily, he said, he did not have any run-ins with IEDs or resistance fighters while working to train Iraqi troops during his deployment in the 2007 troop surge.

Besides age (Hofmann is 34), one major difference between veterans and students who have not served in the military is experience.

Hofmann said that part of his time in the army has taught him to deal with difficult people and work well in teams, both tasks learned in situations many find trying. It took him several weeks to build up trust with an Iraqi border police lieutenant named Jassem, his intelligence counterpart in the Iraqi unit.

Although the Iraqis do not have sophisticated intelligence equipment like the U.S. military does, they have informants in a network Hofmann wanted to work to help make better.

“For him to share that with me, you do have to build up a rapport with the person,” he said. “You really have to become friends with the person.”

He communicated mostly through an interpreter, but spoke some limited Arabic while working to build up a relationship with the other soldier. About three months into his deployment, he gave Jassem a football as a sign of friendship.

That kind of experience gives veterans like retired Maj. Ed Kobeski a different perspective on topics in the classroom. He found that life in the 82nd Airborne gave him plenty of variety, along with the rest of his army experiences.

“One day I’m jumping out of an airplane, the next day I’m in an office doing paperwork,” he said. “Some of the guys here — nothing against them — come in and they’ve been a businessman for eight years.”

Over the course of a 14-year career in the army, Kobeski went to Iraq, South Korea, Kuwait, Egypt and Qatar over the course of four deployments, first as a chemical officer, then in psychological operations.

“I stayed in a little longer that I wanted to,” Kobeski said. “I thought I would go career, but after four deployments, I kind of threw that away.”

Kobeski said he saw a definite shift over the course of the past decade in the way soldiers viewed their deployments — and the military itself. Like he, they often think they will stay in for a full two decades, before resigning to a certain “solemn acceptance” of multiple deployments or leaving the army for the reserves, as he did.

“On the whole, I’m happy to be a civilian for the most part,” he said. “Except for one weekend a month, I guess that’s good enough for me.”