Home from the fighting and explosions, away from the heat and sand of the Middle East, soldiers become veterans and sometimes become students.
Cory Brown and Chris Bowser are two soldiers who left the battlefield and entered the classroom. At Ball State University alone, 206 students are receiving veteran's benefits, John Hannaford, veterans benefits and financial aid assistant coordinator at Ball State, said.
Although their stories have brought them to college, both men arrived by their own topsy-turvy way.
For starters, Brown said he entered his first semester at Muncie's branch of Ivy Tech Community College in Fall 2008 and plans to transfer to Ball State. Bowser said he's in his first semester back at Ball State.
Brown said he got kicked out of high school twice. Bowser said he got kicked out of college twice.
Brown said he served 27 months in Iraq and left with a herniated disc. Bowser said he served 19 days in Iraq and left with a Purple Heart.
BOWSER'S STORY
On Dec. 8, 2003, Bowser was just doing his job. As the gunner on his Humvee, he manned his MK-19, an automatic belt-fed grenade launcher. His Humvee and three others were escorting 30 troops on patrol in front of them along a four-lane highway separated by a median.
In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Bowser said he shined his flashlight at the ground to check for any roadside bombs or piles of trash that might hide explosives. It was night, and he said few streetlights illuminated the desert ghetto.
Bowser's Humvee was going against traffic, he said. So his Humvee drove behind another vehicle while leaving a lane for oncoming cars next to them. Not only was Bowser's Humvee last, he said, but he faced backward and didn't see what happened.
But he did see two guys in the middle of the median smoking a hookah. Bowser said he thought it was funny and began to laugh at the same time something exploded.
Smoke poured around him. All he saw was a white flash.
What the hell was that?
Explosions happened all the time in Iraq, Bowser said, so he tried to figure out where the explosion happened. Was it a grenade? A roadside bomb?
It turned out someone from an oncoming car threw a grenade into his Humvee, and Bowser's legs took a direct hit.
After the grenade hit him, he said, the fact he couldn't feel his legs also did.
It was at that moment Bowser realized his legs got hit, and he said he sat on top of the truck. He said he couldn't look at his legs.
If Bowser did look at his legs, he would have seen bone sticking out of his pants. The blast of shrapnel gave him a compound fracture.
But he didn't want to be a target on top of his truck, he said. He didn't have a pistol to protect himself and he couldn't maneuver the grenade launcher. So he shoved himself off the truck into the street, he said.
Other men and a medic came to his aid while he lay on the ground. He said his first sergeant was one of the guys who came to his side.
"Hey buddy," the first sergeant said. "Look at the bright side: Now you get to go home and see your family."
Bowser said he laughed.
"I just got here and was looking forward to staying awhile," he said.
Bowser even spoke to his mother a few days before the blast and said it seemed like he was on a vacation with explosions and guns, he said. Even all the sand didn't bother him. Bowser said he matured a lot during his stint in the military. After he graduated from high school, he went to Ball State only to get kicked out twice in one year.
From there, he moved in with a girlfriend and worked at an amusement park in Michigan during the summer and fall of 2001.
On Sept. 11, he remembered reading about the events. Bowser said later he saw several people huddled around televisions.
"I had a family member who could see the wreckage from her office in New York," he said. "Obviously, there are people who had much more personal loss, but just to even have someone in my family see something like that wasn't fun."
Afterward, he joined the military.
His training took him from boot camp to more training in South Korea. Bowser said he wasn't mature before Korea, but he matured during a 30-mile road march.
Bowser had been stationed there for about six months, and new arrivals looked up to him. But he kept complaining about the training.
On his run, he kept complaining about how his body couldn't cope with it anymore, he said. He said he thought the military could punish him, but he couldn't keep marching - until someone he hated came up to him and told him to set an example for the new troops.
"At that moment in my life I just learned mind over matter," he said. "I knew the concept, but finally started applying it."
From Korea, Bowser went back to the States and left for Iraq on Nov. 12 as Specialist Chris Bowser with the 1/502nd Infantry Division. There, Bowser got hit with a grenade and made it back to America on Dec. 12.
The one consolation for being hit with a grenade was that it saved his Humvee's driver and passenger. Bowser said the windshield was littered with shrapnel except for the spots where their heads were. His legs also blocked the blast from hitting or setting off a box of 75 grenades by his feet.
If the blast would have detonated the box of grenades in the turret, Bowser said he would be nothing "but a pink mist."
In an Iraqi hospital, Bowser said, Gen. David Petraeus presented him with the Purple Heart. He was flown up to Germany where doctors put screws in his legs and cut out four hunks from his skin. Underneath the skin, Bowser said, tissue called fascia started to bunch up like crumpled Saran wrap. It was cutting off circulation in his legs and it was either get his legs amputated or get scars.
Doctors told him at the time he wouldn't walk for two and half years, he said. But by the end of following January, Bowser was walking with crutches. The only downside he said is that he couldn't run, but he felt he got so much out of the situation.
Because of the Purple Heart, Bowser said, he gets his schooling paid for. And besides, he said, his legs saved two guys' lives.
"It's a sweet gig," Bowser, 26, said. "Because when I honestly try to sit down and think about what is the bad I took from this experience I really draw a blank."
BROWN'S STORY
During the summer before he went to basic training, Cory Brown lined up a job of working as a custodian at his high school. He needed to pay off a $5,000 debt.
He and his friends broke into Delta High School about two weeks before they were going to graduate. Inside, they pulled a senior prank: They released hundreds of mice and crickets into the building, put toothpicks in the keyholes, zip-tied all the lockers shut and bleached "04" into the commons area carpet.
"I do not regret," he said. "It was pretty cool."
It was Monday at about 3 a.m. They tried to find a way through the building and finally found a latch through the top of the building to get in. They crawled underneath pipes and came in through the custodian's office.
The school later found him and expelled him. Brown, a Muncie resident, decided to go to basic training about a month before he actually did. He never even gave it thought before that.
"I just thought it would help me get on my way," he said.
He said he joined the service as a way to gain independence. Besides, he wasn't ready for more school. He said he hadn't really enjoyed school since late in elementary school.
He said one reason why he didn't enjoy school was because he was diagnosed at an early age with Tourette syndrome.
"I wasn't the most avid student," he said. "It kind of built in an inferiority complex."
As a child, he was given medicine that didn't work and found his own way to control his Tourette's. He became an exercise junkie as a way to combat it. In high school, he did soccer, baseball, wrestling and pole vaulting.
When it came to going into the military, he never told anyone about it because he didn't want it to stop him. Brown joined the 3rd Infantry Division.
He worked as an infantry soldier, or grunt, in the Al Anbar province in cities such as Ramadi and Fallujah. But he also worked in southern Baghdad. He described some of the cities he came to as looking leveled and as if Armageddon occurred there. He said to imagine a crazy video game and that's what some parts looked like.
In these neighborhoods, Brown had Iraqis as neighbors living in houses of sticks and mud that were sometimes blown away by the rotors of a helicopter.
In Iraq, Brown's job consisted of sweeping areas where insurgents had a strong hold of those areas. He and his men's job included sweeping the area and capture the insurgents and their supplies.
He lived so close to his fellow soldiers that they even slept in the same vehicles and Iraqi houses. A lot of the time, he said, they would seem almost like hobos, just hopping from one area to another.
"We went where they were at and seized the area they were in," he said.
Brown said he couldn't even name how many insurgents he captured while in Iraq. They'd zip-tie their hands and live in the same house with them before they could go to another prison area.
With traveling throughout Iraq stopping insurgents, he said he couldn't shower in the houses he lived in, which didn't help with the sand getting everywhere. With sandstorms, so much sand got kicked into the air that sometimes people could see where they were going.
"You just got to tough it out," he said. "Eventually, you just get callused in a way."
Brown said he didn't get shot and left the Middle East with a herniated disc, although he had many close calls, he said. Once he lived in a house that got hit with an explosive and one of his friends died.
He said he remembered his last close call when he was in southern Baghdad. He walked away from his vehicle to patrol when a roadside bomb blew underneath the front of the truck.
He later crept close to the truck to get the driver out, he said, who was still alive but had a broken leg. Even though another bomb was near the vehicles rear tire and exploded sometime later.
He said he's lucky he left only with that, but he's still trying to get compensated for his herniated disc he had for eight months in Iraq without treatment.
"It's the army," he said. "Everybody has back problems. I guess they thought I didn't have any back problems and I tried to chicken out."
After Brown finished his service, he began taking classes at Ivy Tech Community College as a way to transition to school life. The once athletic man can't do sports anymore because of the herniated disc. But to compensate, he plays disc golf in McCullough Park.
Inside the trunk of his car, there's a bag full of Frisbees. He said he enjoys the sport so much that he's thought about becoming a professional disc golf player. He said all it takes to be considered a professional is to pay a fee.
BEING STUDENTS
Brown said the transition to school was difficult. At first, he didn't know if he could even make the transition from battle to classroom. A lot of people stay in the military because they are afraid they can't do anything outside it, he said.
"It was just as hard going in as you are going out," he said. "It's all I knew. I was definitely nervous."
But thanks to the military life, Brown said, he matured a lot and knew he had to make school his first priority.
"I'm more focused than I've ever been in high school," he said.
As for his future, he changed his major from general studies to education. He said he would enjoy teaching and the comfortable lifestyle of a teacher. His goal would be to teach history.
Bowser said he never doubted he could make the transition from the military to the classroom. Bowser took a break after he got out of the military, which gave him a chance to realize he could refocus on school.
"It's almost like a job," he said. "This whole putting forth effort thing is kind of new to me, but I'm dealing with it."
Bowser said now he studies music and will see one of his four favorite guitarists Thursday: Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. Bowser even bought the exact same nine pedals for his guitar that Morello plays with.
Bowser hopes to become a musician one day. He said he plans to go to Los Angeles after college and go to the Musicians Institute.
"Life gave me lemons and I made bad ass lemonade," he said.
Source: bsudailynews.com
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