Returning Veterans at Brooklyn's City Tech

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Michael Weinreb has an excellent slice-of-life article in today's NYT on returning veterans attending college at Brooklyn's City Tech on the G.I Bill after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. This passage stood out for me:

...membership in the year-old City Tech veterans club is small. Weekly meetings draw only four or five people out of the 200 veterans enrolled at the school. “Not that many people want to be identified as veterans,” said Moises Murillo, who retired from the Navy in 2004 and is a former president of the club. “You ask some people if they’re a military veteran and they say, ‘What do you care?’”

Such suspiciousness grows from incidents like one in April, when City Tech dental hygiene students, some of whom have friends and relatives serving overseas, held a fund-raiser to send mouthwash, toothpaste and other toiletries to soldiers in Iraq. A table was set up in a second-floor hallway of Namm Hall. Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Byrnes, from the veterans’ aid office, were there, along with several student veterans and one soldier in uniform, who attended as a representative of the military, beneficiary of the event.

At various points, according to Mr. Byrnes, a faculty member and a City Tech staff person argued that a man in uniform should not be allowed on the school’s grounds, momentarily casting a shadow over the proceedings.

Weinreb's piece serves as an interesting counterpoint to yesterday's profile of Colby Buzzell...if not life in the first years of the G.I. Bill, sixty years ago.

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