Interviewed by Peter Ma
I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood in Nevada. I didn’t have a lot of money and I pretty much didn’t have any passing grades in any class from fifth grade on. I didn’t graduate high school—none of my friends graduated and no one from my family graduated. Basically, when you hit 16 or 17 years old, it was common to just drop out and start working. So, that’s what I did too. I started working at pizza places and that was the first time I really got a spark that I wanted to do something in my life. So, in 2004, I opened a small pizza place of my own. However, the mixture of being a young 21-year-old, not having any education and not understanding business, made it one of the worst experiences of my life. I worked from 9 AM to 9 PM seven days a week and had four days off a year. I was very happy when I finally closed the place.
This closing kind of lined up with the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq, in 2005. It was a big battle—the biggest battle on global terrorism in my opinion, with the exception of the invasion on Iraq. I could watch news of Fallujah live on CNN and that was the first time I really wanted to get involved with what I viewed as my generation’s moment. I had thought the Iraq War was stupid from the beginning, but that didn’t change the fact that my generation—we were the 18, 19, and 20-year-olds—was fighting in this war and that people I knew were going in it.
So, in 2005, after Fallujah, and after I had closed my restaurant, I decided to join the army. I signed up as 11 Bravo, which was an infantryman, the most front-line fighting guy. I later ended up in a sniper section in Korea, where I met a woman and got married. Then, I went to Fort Hood where I got recruited for long-range surveillance (LRS) in a new elite unit called R&S, reconnaissance and surveillance. 2011 was when I did my major deployment to Afghanistan. We were originally going to do all sorts of cool stuff like downed aircraft recovery, raids, and all these different kinds of things, but last minute they put us in an area of operations (AO), which was not something our unit was designed for. We were organized in these very small six-man teams—our whole squadron totaled 270 people compared with the normal thousand-member battalions—but they gave us an entire AO in Southern Afghanistan. We were a scalpel and they were giving us a job suited for hammers. It was one of the worst places at the time. You couldn’t drive off the hardball road without hitting an IED. I got there in June 2011 and it got kinetic right away. The second mission I went on, my friend died and I hit a big IED and got injured. That was just how the deployment was going to go.
It was a very rough time. In terms of operation tempo, most people were going out four, five times a week, but we were going out for 12, sometimes 15 times a week. Sometimes we would go out for a patrol all day long, pull back in, fill the truck up, and then go right back out. Anytime the commander wanted to go anywhere, anytime something was happening, anytime someone needed anything done quick, they came to us. It was high stress job. My unit was engaged pretty regularly, especially with IEDs, and we would pretty often get shot at. One time our unit even had a firefight that lasted from sun up to sundown.
It was a tough time, but there were also some amazing things that came from it. You can’t imagine the level of camaraderie you can build with people until all this modern crap is gone. There’s no what am I going to wear tomorrow? You’re going to wear a uniform. There’s no hey how am I going to pay my cell phone bill? You don’t have a phone. There’s no where am I going to sleep? You’re going to sleep whenever you are told to sleep. Life is boiled down to these ultra-simplistic means and you realize how little you can get by with. Pretty much all you really need to get by is water, reasonable amounts of food, and then your friends. That's it. Everything else is tertiary. Everything else you don’t really need any more after a while. You get to a point where all you have are the twelve guys around you. Even if we don’t like each other, no one else could say anything about our section. We were brothers.
And you’re kind of in this existence where only yesterday, today, and tomorrow matter. Three days in the future is too far to think about and a week ago never happened. You’re just in this weird limbo of existence and that’s kind of what deployments turn into after a while. You realize that after a certain point your guys are just kind of like these robots. You can go out for 12 hours, be dead tired, come back, and have go get right back on your trucks ready to go. It’s kind of an amazing thing, really. You don't see that in regular life anymore, people pushing themselves to this point of absolute performance, out of dedication to each other. What the army tells us to do doesn't matter anymore. We’re doing it essentially because if one of us is going, we’re all going to go. It’s a beautiful thing that you don't get to see anymore.
Eventually, I got a little tired of the army and also had some traumatic brain injuries from that big IED I hit, so I decided to leave the military. I went from Afghanistan to a community college classroom in like 90 days, which was not a great idea. I went from having a support structure—from never being more than 5 feet away from somebody—to living completely on my own, in a city that I had been away from my entire adult life, in a classroom that I had never really sat in, and being asked to do things that I didn’t really understand. I didn’t even know what a syllabus was. That was how far out of touch from being a student I was. Although I still did fairly well for about a year in the community college, I was very aimless and had no idea what I wanted to do. I got divorced and was living in a terrible neighborhood, completely on the fringe as my friends would say. I constantly wanted to rejoin the army because at least I understood that.
In 2014, I came home from the gym to find a dude robbing my house. I got into a fight with him and he shot a gun. It missed me, but it was very traumatic and that was my tipping point. The next day, by pure chance, a private military company called me and asked if I wanted to go back to Afghanistan. I said okay and three weeks later I was on a plane going back to Afghanistan. That just made sense to me at the time and I just thought that would fix everything.
So, I went back and worked as a private military contractor. It gave me another year to think about things. During then, a friend of mine who I was in the infantry with had gotten out and had been accepted into Wesleyan University. I knew enough to know that it was a good school, so I was like how did you get into Wesleyan? He told me that opportunities were available to veterans, you just have to really want to do it. I sat down and thought about it after the conversation with him. Within five minutes of just sitting there quietly, I was hundred percent dedicated and was like this is what I am going to do, this is my new goal.
I quit that private contracting job, got back to the states, and hit the ground just completely focused on that. I applied to 14 schools and got into many of them. I ended up choosing Penn and decided to major in African studies, which was something that I loved a lot. I had lived in Africa for my private contracting job, so it had always been a focal point in my life, but it wasn’t until I sat in a class that I really fell in love with the subject.
My first summer at Penn, I went to Kenya and that was the first time I was completely surrounded by undergrads. But after that summer, I left Kenya with ten really close undergrad friends. We were part of a unique group and we still are. That was when I really realized that Penn was a lot more than just classes and that I was a lot more than just a veteran—I was also a student. I’ve since joined clubs, been more active, and tried to be a bigger part of the community. And since then, I’ve totally loved it. I think this is the best experience I’ve had and it came at the right time. I think I was on the course to make some bad decisions and coming to Penn has let me realize that there are other things in life besides fighting wars.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m a 19-year-old. I’m a 35-year-old who has spent more time in Afghanistan than in a classroom. Certainly, there’s no escaping those experiences. But being a veteran is just one of the many experiences that should define you, not the only one. I’m not going to stand up on the first day of every class and be like let me explain why I’m older than you. What I am going to say is I study Africa and this is why I love Africa. Those are the things I like to say when I’m introducing myself. I just try to be a student and the more I just try to be a student the more enjoyable it seems to be.
Addition to Jesse's Story:
Interviewed by Peter Ma
Most veterans are quite surprised to hear that I am part of this Keep Vets in the Classroom advocate group at Penn. Previously, I would never have told anyone my veteran story beforehand, and I never participated in any of the school’s attempts to honor my service. I just wanted to be left alone. But this summer, they quietly sent out a letter that said the LPS program for veterans was going away. I read the letter and instantly realized that this meant that there wouldn't be veterans on campus anymore. It really kind of hurt that the school would make a decision to cut a program that would no longer provide the guys getting out of the military now the same opportunities that I had. It really affected me and I immediately thought, what can I do to change this?
The LPS program is important because it provides a holistic admissions process for veteran adults. How can the next generation of veterans applying to college otherwise compete with a perfect 4.0 student out of a prestigious high school with a 1600 SAT and a perfectly polished essay? My number one goal is to get Penn to look at veterans holistically just like they do for any other special group. The administration seems very willing to come up with a solution that keeps veterans on campus, but I just don’t know if we’re talking about them accepting three veterans a year or 30 a year. I don’t know if the veteran community at Penn will shrink or grow five years from now.
If you break us down into social peer groups, veterans have one of the lowest college graduation rates in the nation. Only around 51% of us start college and graduate. The numbers are pretty abysmal considering that we are federally financed. Across the United States, there are something like half a million veteran students, but a lot of veterans don’t even think about the idea of going to a school like Penn. For some, it is a huge challenge. Many of them are low income, first-generation; many others fear rejection or think that they won’t fit in.
I think it’s also important for veterans to come specifically to schools like Penn so that they can interact with the traditional students who don’t have military service in the family and who don’t really know what that means. These people are going off and getting elected, they’re becoming CEOs of companies, and they’re making policies in Washington. And it is important for them to be in a diverse environment like this as opposed to the bubbles in which they grew up. By making good friends and developing personal connections with veterans here, in the future these students won’t see it as oh we lost three guys in Nigeria, but rather we lost three guys who could have been our friends and roommates. I truly believe in this whole diversity thing that Penn preaches, and I think that veterans should be part of that diversity. We really bring unique conversations to classrooms. Could you imagine sitting in a Middle Eastern class and talking about policy? How about we ask the guy who went to Iraq two years ago? I think he would have something important to say. For this to happen, for this diversity to exist, we need to keep vets in the classroom.