Irish Hall on College Avenue houses the Veterans Upward Bound program. Photo by Diana Martinez.
Sean Gholz saunters into class a few minutes late. No one around him looks up from their whispered conversations as the professor readies the day’s material, which is surprising, considering Gholz’s physique almost demands attention, or at the very least a stolen glance. At 6-foot-2, Gholz is built like the men in the GO ARMY commercials with a buzz cut to match. It makes sense. Afterall, Gholz is just one of countless veterans at ASU.
“I don’t necessarily like to bring up that I was in the military,” Gholz says. “I don’t necessarily like to have people look at me in that light because it obviously makes people have a different opinion of you. I’d rather people get to know me first as a person as opposed to getting to know me as a veteran.”
Gholz, a 26-year-old economics major at the W.P. Carey School, joined the military five days after his 19th birthday. A man with political aspirations, he thinks his time in the military will serve him well, even as he pursues his undergraduate and, he hopes, a law degree. After serving for a year in Iraq and 15 months in Afghanistan, he chose ASU and was accepted while stationed in Hawaii for the remainder of his tour. He enrolled and began taking classes at ASU the following January — less than four months after his leave from the military.
“I don’t think that I needed more time off; I don’t think time off would have been more beneficial,” Gholz says. “In all reality Iraq wasn’t really that bad of a deployment. I didn’t really have that many problems coming back from Iraq as in like shock, or wariness or whatnot. It was difficult in a lot of different ways, but it wasn’t like Afghanistan was. Afghanistan was a tough deployment. Iraq was much more … annoying. I didn’t agree with the Iraq war. I didn’t agree with why we were there. … I t didn’t seem like we were doing as much good as we could have been doing and as much good as we should have been doing. It just didn’t seem like we were doing anything, it didn’t seem like we were making a difference at all.”
Gholz’s opinions on America’s current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent neither the views of the military nor the student population, but rather Gholz himself, which he prefers. Through classroom discussions and personal conversations, it becomes clear he works purposefully to create a persona for himself that encompasses both his role as a man of the military and a student of post-secondary education.
The road to self-identification hasn’t been easy for Gholz and those around him. Professors and peers battle their own pre-conceived notions of what a veteran should be, and this struggle doesn’t exist only at universities. It is a national issue of identity and understanding, one that ASU is trying to combat.
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