A veteran returns to school
Five years after flunking out of the University of Illinois, my university studies resumed full-time in the spring of 1973. In the five years from May 1968 to March 1973, I’d pumped gas in Aurora, Illinois, worked on the welding line as a UAW member at Caterpillar Tractor Company, served a four-year hitch in the Air Force and picked up another year of college going part-time.
Buying an order of French fries at the student center cafeteria, the cashier commented on my tan, which was unusual for a student at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville in March, 1973. I replied I’d just spent fifteen months in the South Pacific and sauntered off to a vacant table.
I thought she wouldn’t know where Okinawa was and I didn’t care to go into any deeper explanation. With a month having passed since my discharge, my hair was just long enough and my beard filled in enough to leave behind the more obvious signs of my former military membership. SIUE had its share of veterans but there were enough other “non-traditional” students, that is students who were older than a typical eighteen to twenty-two-year-old college student that the veterans didn’t stand out all that much.
Lots of kids wore fatigue shirts and old field jackets, so not even wearing bits and pieces of old uniforms necessarily meant veteran status. Veterans though could pick each other out. Some of the vets hung out in one corner of the first-floor lounge in the student center.
I didn’t. I was too busy hustling. Hustling part-time jobs. Hustling to pack the credit hours in to get out of school and get that BA, my new union card, as soon as possible.
With the weather warming up, I’d ride my $69 K-mart special ten-speed bicycle from my downtown Edwardsville rental house the three or four miles out to campus. The spring pollens filled my throat with phlegm creating problems for me in my afternoon radio broadcasting course. Even with a raspy voice, I managed an A, just as I did in most of my other courses that first term back as a full-time college student.
At U of I in 1967, I only had one veteran in all of my courses. The instructor asked him the first day if he was a grad student. “No, came his reply, “I’m a veteran.” He seemed ancient to me. I wonder now if there weren’t many veterans who went to U of I in ’67 because there sure weren’t any in the dorms or the frats or the general studies classes that I passed through. It seemed like all the kids were suburban Chicago high school graduates with a mixture of out of state kids and the occasional downstate small-town boy or girl.
SIUE on the other hand had mostly local kids commuting from the working-class Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, mixed with older students seeking to better their career prospects, a handful of international students, most from Iran, and the long-haired, bearded veterans, some looking for a better life, others just using their GI Bill benefits to avoid finding a job in the steel mills.
None of us student veterans went to the American Legion or the VFW. We all had long hair and beards and mostly didn’t care much for our draft induced military service. We were just looking to move on down the road from nitpicking about too long hair and shaggy moustaches from the lifers. A lifer being anyone with more than a first hitch who was looking to stay for a career. The guys in the Legion or the VFW were all crew cut, big bellied old guys who didn’t like us long hairs. That was fine with us, we didn’t like them either.
Nope, we drank quarter draft beers in Vanzo’s with the townies or packed the old Stagger Inn on weekends with noise, music and cigarette smoke. Vanzo’s burned down. Stagger Inn moved uptown. And now SIUE has dormitories and more students than Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, which we then called the “mother ship”, because it was the century old original SIU, while our campus was the upstart six-year-old commuter school.
Like many of the other vets, I wore my olive drab field jacket, with no insignia of rank or service, from October through March, really didn’t have much of another winter jacket to wear. A couple of years after graduating, it went off with me to law school at the “mother ship”, where I wore it to keep me warm in my ten-year-old VW Karman Ghia convertible with its miserable excuse for a heater. The heater was so weak that I had to keep an ice scraper handy to scrape the inside of the windshield so I could see while driving.
That old field jacket went back into service for a couple of years after I joined the Army National Guard until the Army changed to the NATO woodland pattern camouflage field jacket. The old olive green went back into the basement closet where it languished for a couple of decades until younger son went off to college.
I guess old Army field jackets were still in style, so he asked to take it to school. With the liner, it was a pretty good windbreak for those winter winds that pick up speed coming across Iowa before they hit Galesburg, Illinois, and Knox College. Those old field jackets were so popular it disappeared at the first fraternity party he wore it to that freshman year.
I sure do miss that old field jacket.
© William L. Enyart 2022
Email: bill@billenyart.com
Audio production by: Tom Calhoun, www.paguytom.com