The Veteran Student. We are from every state and from many countries. We are older, we are married and unmarried; many of us have children. We come from all walks of life, we speak many languages, we represent every race, creed, color, religion and sexual orientation. We are liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. We grew up in rich and poor families, educated and uneducated. Some of us are just starting school; some of us already hold advanced degrees. We have seen more than most. We have been to every continent; some of us never left the United States. We served in Iraq and Afghanistan; we have been on humanitarian missions to Croatia and Bangladesh, we fought fires in California and filled sandbags in Louisiana.
We all have seen things we never want to forget; some of us have seen things we never want to remember. We all know someone who didn't make it back. We worked 12-, 18-, 24-hour shifts, 18-month deployments. We moved and moved and moved. We missed births, birthdays and anniversaries. We became strangers at home; we came home strangers. We were reunited with our families; we watched our families fall apart.
One thing unites us: service before self. We wanted to make our country and the world a better place. We wanted to pay back those who went before us, those who had sacrificed for what we had so long taken for granted. We signed up before the war, after the war, we all knew that we might have to go somewhere; we all knew we might not come back. We swore an oath, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We are diverse, we serve and we lead.
We represent to AU what AU represents to the world. Nov. 11 was Armistice Day - a day to celebrate peace. It was also Veterans Day - a day to remember the tens of millions who have served, the hundreds of thousands who died. It was a day for us to remember and be remembered. It was not a university holiday, but maybe the best way to celebrate Veterans Day was to come to school and work, as we have worked so many other holidays and think of those in uniform who don't get the day off or the weekend. A day to call someone who is serving now to say thanks, and think about someone we can never call again. In memory, Cpl. Jeremy David Allbaugh, USMC, killed in action, July 5, 2007, Al Anbar, Iraq.
Charlie Fowler Washington College of Law, 2011
