Iraq war leaves legacies at Penn

On campus, those with ties to Iraq have mixed feelings toward the war’s new phase, Operation New Dawn. While many see the end of combat in Iraq as laudable, they believe uncertainty looms for the country — and troops — in transition.

Veterans On weekdays, former combat engineer Wendell Chavis studies pre-calculus, computer skills, science and English in David Rittenhouse Laboratory.

He is enrolled in the Penn-hosted Veterans Upward Bound, a federally funded college preparatory program which, according to Director Diane Sandefur, is the only VUB that is housed at an Ivy League institution.

Though they are not technically enrolled at Penn, “our students are considered guests at the University … Our grant is hosted by Penn and it allows our students to access many of the privileges that are on campus,” Sandefur explained.

School, however, does not fully occupy Chavis’ time. Weekly meetings are held by the Veterans Association center for him and other veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It helps, staying in contact with your therapist and other veterans,” Chavis said.

From 2004 to 2005, Chavis said, his combat unit’s primary roles were as improvisational explosive device hunters.

While performing his duty, he said, he encountered “eight or nine IEDs” and was knocked unconscious three times — “but after all the training we did, I woke up like nothing was wrong,” he said.

He attributed such preparedness to a state of mind.

“By the time we got into Iraq we were fully ‘battlemind,’” Chavis said. “You had to be battlemind to get into this. It’s sort of like — I call it brainwashing, all the stuff we did.”

Chavis’ unit was scheduled to undergo a mission in a town one night, but was replaced by another at the last minute. The non-commissioned officer of that unit requested air support due to low visibility, but was denied.

“The NCO took it upon himself and went in there anyway — and all his men got wiped out in their convoy,” Chavis said. “That kind of did something to me because we were supposed to be on that mission and we got scrubbed.”

The event awakened him to his surroundings. “The smell was unbelievable. The living condition was not like here in the U.S.,” he explained. “Saddam Hussein’s regime was there, and every day you’d get sniper fire and bombs going off. You get immune to it, though.”

Chavis’ experience in Iraq led to a mixed opinion on the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. “I was happy about it, but also, I don’t want the troops to leave the country without the Iraqi forces being well-trained. If they leave, who knows who can overrun the country?”

However, the concern from fellow VUB student Terry Lee lies with the returning troops.

“What Obama is doing is good because a lot of people want the war to end,” he said. “But my question is, what’s going to happen to a lot of these soldiers who never had a job?”

Lee, a cook in Iraq, admitted having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. He now has high blood pressure, trouble with his back, knees “and just mental stuff. I had to watch how I control my anger. I take medicine to keep me calm, but you just try to put yourself in situations where you don’t really care,” he said.

Those situations still arise from time to time, however — including on campus.

“I ran into some students here during [New Student] Orientation and some of them asked, ‘aren’t you kind of old to go to school?’ I said, ‘yeah, but why? I thought you were never too old to learn,’” Lee recalled.

The Community

Though not veterans, many on campus find themselves reaching out and assisting the soldiers they know personally.

Veterans’ presence “helps fulfill the Penn Compact by reaching out to the community,” Sandefur said. “Having a community presence on campus connects Penn and all Penn students with individuals from the community.”

College senior Brady Lonergan began assisting with tutoring at VUB last year. “Truthfully, it’s inexplicable how rewarding the experience has turned out to be,” Lonergan wrote in an e-mail. “It’s a lot of fun, and it’s easy to relate with the VUB students.”

Nursing senior Jennifer Newcomer had a close friend in the Marines’ infantry, until he left to marry Newcomer’s best friend. But after not finding a job in a tough economy, he was forced to turn to the military again.

“The Marines wouldn’t take him back — it was just harder to get back into the Marines — so he joined the Army, and that’s where he still is,” Newcomer said.

He was told in the early summer that he would be deployed to Iraq, but was then told otherwise in early August.

“When I first thought he was being deployed again, I was very upset because I’ve been in the Middle East and I know how it is,” Newcomer said.

In the summer of 2009, Newcomer was part of a nursing initiative program in Afghanistan — where, she said, she was always reminded of being an American in a war zone — especially on daily trips to the clinic.

“We’d be in a safe house and it’d be like, ‘OK, the bus is coming, try to run to it so that no one sees you,’” she said.

Once reaching the clinic, however, they could only stay for six hours because “once people started getting word that Americans were helping, it’d be a security risk,” Newcomer explained.

One occasion provided reason to worry. “There was a pretty big IED explosion while we were there that killed six people, I believe — a few American,” Newcomer said. “It was on the road we were using the day before, but for some reason we decided not to use it that day.”

She was hopeful, however, that her friend’s Marine training would be useful. “What I heard was that when you’re in the Marines, they teach you to think for yourself,” she said.

Newcomer also struggles with her opinion on the news. “This conflict is probably going to occur for an indefinite amount of time,” she said. “For us to be in there helping out — yeah, that’s good and everything, but as soon as we leave, everything will very quickly revert to how it was.”

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