Inside Higher Education
05-19-06
Student Casualties of Iraq
David Veverka had been on track to receive a bachelor’s degree in wildlife
ecology this month at the University of Maine.
But he had to miss the spring semester when the Army reservist was called up
this year and sent to Iraq, where a roadside bombing killed him — just over a
week before graduation ceremonies in Orono. The university observed a moment
of silence in his memory on graduation day, and awarded him his degree
posthumously, presenting it at his funeral the next day.
Veverka — a fraternity brother, a research assistant, a volunteer with local
schoolchildren — was popular and well known on campus. And he was the first
Maine student killed in wartime since Vietnam. “Any time a student dies, it’s a
shocking and unexpected tragedy,” said Robert Dana, dean of students at Maine.
“But when someone dies serving our country, that’s an added focus.”
Maine is quite typical in that it doesn’t have much experience in dealing with such
deaths. Just last week, Western Michigan University was holding a memorial
service for Matthew Webber, a junior and a member of the National Guard who
died in April, months after being injured in an explosion. He was the first wartime
fatality for the university since Vietnam.
There have been more than 2,400 military fatalities in Iraq since the start of the
war, and it’s unclear how many of those people were students. Most lists of the
dead include their home towns and service records and many students in the
military are enrolled part time so their primary identity may not be as a student.
Many campuses are also deeply affected by deaths of young alumni in Iraq,
many of them people just a year or two out of college and with close connections
still there. As the war continues, more colleges — some of them with deep
military traditions to draw on and others without — are considering how to honor
their war dead and how to help the grieving.
Students have been among the war dead in Iraq from the beginning of the U.S.
invasion, in 2003. In the first week, Evan T. James, a Marine reservist who had
been a sophomore at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was killed.
James aspired to be a personal trainer and his family created a scholarship at
Southern Illinois, in his memory, for similar students. Another early casualty, just
weeks later, was Joseph B. Maglione, a junior at Drexel University, who has also
been honored with a scholarship. So was one of the first graduate students killed.
David Travis Friedrich was three courses shy of a master’s degree in forensic
science at the University of New Haven when he was killed in September 2003.
The scholarship in his memory will give out its first award this fall.
Iraq deaths have also prompted many institutions to return to campus memorials
to the dead from previous wars. The Palomar Community College District, in
California, created a memorial during the Vietnam War and last year added the
names of seven students and recent alumni who were killed in Iraq. Several
more deaths since then mean that the monument — a granite wall with a flag —
will need to be updated again.
Two deaths from Iowa State University are the first wartime casualties since
Vietnam and have prompted plans for an addition to the Gold Star Hall in the
Memorial Union. The student union was opened in 1928 as a place for students
and also as a memorial to the war dead of World War I, honored in the hall.
(During World War I, families put blue stars in their windows for family members
who were in the military, and changed those stars to gold for family members
who were killed in the war.) Since then, names were also added for students and
alumni who died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
The university is committed to adding names from Iraq, but is holding off on
doing so because it wants to follow past practice, and add the names when the
war is over.
Several universities with active military ties and cadet corps — including the
Citadel, Norwich University, Texas A&M University, and the Virginia Military
Institute — have thus far escaped student casualties (but not alumni deaths).VMI
sends honor guards to the funerals of its alumni, eight of whom have died in Iraq.
Virginia Tech, which also has a Corps of Cadets, has had ceremonies in each of
the last three years to add names to a memorial (see photograph above) to those
who have died in wars.
“It’s important that we recognize the sacrifice those gentlemen made for us,” said
Rock Roszak, a retired Air Force colonel who is director of alumni relations for
the corps at Virginia Tech. To the many students who will enter active service
upon graduation, he said, these ceremonies “bring home the seriousness of the
business they are preparing for.”
For campuses without established war memorials, much depends on whether
someone steps forward to organize a way to honor a student who died.
At Western Michigan, Dori LaChance, the lead registration clerk, has unofficially
become the point person for providing support to students who are in Iraq — she
knows of 15 and suspects there are a few more. Because LaChance helps
students with veterans’ benefits and with the process of preparing for militaryrelated leaves, she got to know those who are in the military. With a volunteer
team, she organizes efforts to send holiday packages to the contingent.
So when one of those students died last month, she organized a memorial
service. “This was really a shock to all of us,” she said.
Dealing with that shock also falls to campuses.
Dana, the dean of students at Maine, said that as soon as the institution learned
of Veverka’s death, officials quickly identified all the academic and social circles
in which he moved so that counselors could reach out to students and faculty
members and involve them in scheduling a campus memorial.
“It’s absolutely critical that when a student death occurs, people don’t
underestimate the impact. People need to find ways to express their feelings and
work through grief,” he said.
Even in an era when students are politically divided over (or indifferent about) the
war, and in which students aren’t known for a respect for tradition, there are
signs that the death of students in wartime has an impact — perhaps even more
so because the end of the draft means that many students need not think about
the war, except when it hits home.
At Iowa State, the Gold Star Hall is located by one of the main entrances to the
student union, and so the area is full of students who are much more likely to be
headed to the food court than to pause and reflect. Kathy Svec, marketing
coordinator for the student union there, said that prior to the war in Iraq, the
idea of the student union as a memorial “went out of style” and most students
walking by the list of names “probably just assumed that they were big donors —
I don’t think people got it.”
After the war started, a student came to the student union’s managers and asked
to have a sign put up at the doorways that lead students into the union, through
Gold Star Hall. The sign asks people to remove their hats out of a sign of
respect. Somewhat to her initial surprise, Svec said, “many students now actually
take off their hats when walking by.”
— Scott Jaschik