Felix Zacharias instinctively swerves around potholes when he’s driving. The staccato of exploding fireworks jolts him when he’s not expecting it. He’ll look up for flares calling for an extract. He smokes cigars to calm his nerves.

Zacharias, Wichita sophomore, knows he’s back in Jayhawk country, not the dangerous Sunni Triangle in Iraq that surrounds Baghdad, angles north towards Tikrit and expands west across the Euphrates River past Ramadi. He knows IEDs, such as the two that destroyed Humvees in which he rode, won’t explode in discarded beer cans on the side of the street. As long as he can see a firework being lit, memories of combat and the flutter of medic helicopters don’t seem to flood back unexpectedly.

But watching Iraq implode from a Humvee turret tends to make a man cautious, no matter where he is.

Zacharias, a political science major whose gap-tooth smile belies his experience, said he was more relaxed than before he was deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, in 2006, shortly after an American offensive reclaimed the city. He drinks less, probably holds his tongue a bit more, but that doesn’t mean he wants to talk about it.

“When people ask me what I did in Iraq, I just tell them it’s hot,” Zacharias said. It’s not a subject most students at the University of Kansas – or any other University – can easily relate to.”

Dan Parker, McPherson junior, said that veterans – like him and Zacharias – are largely overlooked at the University.

“I would say that veterans are pretty easily the most underrepresented special group on campus,” Parker said. Joan Hahn, assistant registrar, said there were about 180 veterans enrolled at the University.

While the University supplies counseling services for all students, including young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are no veteran-specific services. The University’s lone staff member assigned to assisting veterans is Hahn, but there are no other official advocates on campus.

Her role as a Veterans Administration-certified official is to assist veterans returning to campus with enrollment, as well as ensuring that vets receive their education benefits. Many vets begin the enrollment process when they are still on active duty, Hahn said. This can make enrollment tricky.

“If the individual is currently deployed, they are trying to plan ahead. You’re in a position where you have limited access to a computer; then you have limited access when you’re on the computer,” she said.

Parker, Hahn and Frank DeSalvo, associate vice provost for student success, are working on a plan to create a University position for a full-time veterans advocate who would assist returning soldiers with questions or issues, a task not in Hahn’s job description.

“I think it would be very helpful,” Hahn said. “I think the system now is not ideal. I think it’s better than some. I think it’s not as good as others.”

In response to the lack of on campus support, Parker, a Marine who served two tours in Iraq, founded the Collegiate Veterans Association in fall 2006 with two other former Marines. Parker is president of the group and Zacharias serves as vice president.

The KU chapter, which has about 40 members, was the third to emerge in the country and the first in Kansas. It serves student soldiers as a way to wade through issues ranging from University red tape to the challenge of being older than the majority of students.

Common Experience

“That’s a lot of the reason CVA was actually started,” said Parker, a soft-spoken intelligence specialist who served in northern Iraq and Al Anbar province. “The two guys that I started CVA with, we all kind of sat down and looked around and were like, ‘Well, pretty much everyone we hang out with are veterans.’ Because you have a shared experience, a common experience.”

He said it was hard to connect with young undergraduates who had not been to war.

“Then you sit down with someone who’s also in the military and just right there, regardless of what service they were in, you have a lot in common,” Parker said. “Nobody understands a veteran like another veteran.”

Zacharias, an infantryman who also worked as an intelligence specialist, said CVA was founded for many of the same reasons as organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

He said returning veterans of past wars “had to go through a lot of horrific incidents. It was very tough for those people coming back at the time; these people came back, they had these experiences that they really couldn’t speak about so everyone else could understand.”

“You don’t want to talk to civilians or people who haven’t been there about it because they have no basis for relating to it,” Parker said.

That can limit the services the University provides to veterans, and few take advantage of the resources available on campus, said Pamela Botts, clinical director for Counseling and Psychological Services.

Part of the problem is the military’s attitude toward those who need psychological help, she said.

“The military’s been particularly bad about not appreciating that. There is a stigma there that soldiers are supposed to suck it up and go on.”

Botts said her staff was sensitive to student veterans’ unique circumstances.

“Part of that is understanding the whole context that the veteran might be dealing with,” she said.

“We have relatively limited services here, so if someone is really struggling with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in a way that is interfering with their functioning, we may not be the best resource, because we don’t have the resources,” Botts said.

While veterans seeking help are often referred to the Veterans Administration, many are reluctant to do so, Parker, a political science major, said.

“As soon as you go to the VA to talk about PTSD, you’ll be fitted for a straight jacket,” Parker said. “There’s that stigma that ‘Oh, this guy’s come back and now he’s the crazy war veteran.’”

A Waiting Game

Parker, who suffered hearing loss due to explosions in Iraq, said that he has worked with the VA, with the help of AMVETS, a veterans advocacy group, to assist him in speeding up the claim process. His experience is counter to what many veterans face.

Some veterans who file claims with the VA wait months, sometimes years, to hear the status of their cases. Time out of service only worsens this problem, Parker said, as he explained the difficulties many veterans face. Complicating the process is that many veterans do not file claims upon discharge. Another problem is that some traumas, like PTSD, are not apparent for months or years after soldiers leave the service.

When veterans seek help at the VA or through VA clinics at hospitals, they often have to wait three to five months to even get in the door, Parker said, calling the Lawrence clinic “wildly overbooked.”

Parker said that this could have a detrimental effect to people who needed immediate treatment, and that CVA was attempting to foster communication between CAPS and a traveling VA squad that was set up solely to deal with veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Parker said the partnership would speed up the claim process, making it more efficient by giving veterans resources to help file and monitor their claims.

Parker said it was reasonable that the University was not prepared to deal with a lot of the issues veterans face.

“It’s a smaller population,” he said. “There are some instances, I guess, where CAPS could be useful, but it’s probably better to refer (veterans) to the VA.”

For Zacharias, who displays a photo of his mangled Humvee on his MySpace page and conducted about 100 combat missions, it’s clear that CVA provides a catharsis for war veterans that neither CAPS nor the VA are able to.

“Imagine trying to describe that to a friend of yours who has no idea.”

— Edited by Jessica Sain-Baird