Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus by Ellen Moore (review)

Over the past decade, colleges have seen increasing numbers of students who are veterans, many of whom have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have responded by developing services to help these students adjust to academic life. It is the nexus of these students and services that provides the subject of Ellen Moore's insightful new book, Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus. In Grateful Nation, Moore argues that university faculty and administrators fail to distinguish between helping student veterans adapt to the academy and providing unquestioning support for the institution of the military as well as the prosecution of the current wars. They also fail to recognize how veterans differ from one another.

To make these points, Grateful Nation lets veterans speak for themselves. It is based on three years of qualitative research, most intensively at a community and a four-year college, but also at seven other institutions of higher education. It draws on ethnographic observation of events, meetings, and classes involving veterans. Moore also interviewed fifty former service members who were deployed internationally over the past decade and a half, including some who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the book, Moore directly confronts the assertion that university faculty and students are hostile to veterans, and that this hostility accounts for some of the documented difficulties that veterans have adjusting to the academic environment. According to her argument, administrators and advocates assume that questioning these wars is seen as antagonistic by veterans. They therefore equate help for veterans with support for the military and for the conflicts. As a consequence, they advise university personnel to silence discussion of military policy and practice, and tacitly to present the armed forces as superior to civilian society.

Yet, Moore found no evidence of this supposed hostility in three years of observation. Rather, she argues, faculty and students generally support veterans even when they may disagree with military policy.

Instead, Moore argues that veterans have problems adjusting to the academy not due to hostility, but due partly to the trauma of combat, along with, importantly, military training. Her subjects describe being taught in boot camp to be obedient and disciplined, as well as to subsume their personalities to the group. They then recount their difficulties in shifting to the university environment, which prizes individuality, questioning, and critical thinking.

In addition, Moore demonstrates that veterans are more diverse than they are sometimes represented. She points out, for example, that veterans are most often implicitly conceived as men, both within and outside the armed forces. But she highlights how veteran students describe their lives during and after service differently depending on whether they are male or female. She shows how these differences shape their responses to the civilian and, more specifically, academic environment. For example, female veterans report that they face difficulties navigating the machismo of the armed forces. Many of them tell stories of sexual harassment and sometimes assault in the military. As a consequence, they often feel alienated from the services and clubs at universities that tend to be geared toward a view of service that emphasizes masculinity and projects a generally positive view of the military.

Grateful Nation also shows that veteran students differ from one another not just based on gender, but in less obvious ways. In an illuminating chapter, Moore describes how veterans feel when they hear the common phrase "Thank you for your service." To be sure, some appreciate this expression of gratitude. Others feel frustrated, however, because they think civilians use this slogan to avoid engaging more deeply with veterans' sacrifices and opinions of the wars. They see these words as a way of avoiding dealing directly with civilian responsibilities.

Despite the refreshing attention to veteran diversity, Moore does not touch on another way in which contemporary veterans differ from each other. As...