Student Veterans Struggle to Readjust to Civilian Life

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by Arezou Rezvani

Students in a psychology class at USC erupt into laughter. But one sits there, unamused by the joke. Jayson Kellogg lets out a sigh.

“You realize you’re in a completely different world and no one has any idea what you’ve been through. You know that, so you feel this distinction, you know?”

Jasyon is one of the million-and-a-half young soldiers who’ve returned from war in the last decade. It’s been four years since Jayson returned from two deployments in Iraq, but he is still struggling to readjust. It was pretty bad at first. A stranger’s gaze held too long or the early morning groans from the neighborhood garbage truck took him back in time.

“People looking you in the eye or cars driving by fast or being in a place you don’t know…like if I left the neighborhood, like, if I drove my car outside of Santa Monica I’d have a lot of anxiety and I would notice it in my driving. That’s when I realized there’s something wrong," said Kellogg.

Jayson needed help and understanding that was the first step. Reluctantly at first, he started seeing a social worker at the VA, someone who understood his trauma.

“It’s like a blank canvas and you can kinda throw things up against it and see what happens. It’s just good to have that feedback,” said Kellogg.

Jayson says a key to his adjustment has been trying to understand his reasons for joining the Marines in the first place, which he says had much to do with exploring the outer bounds of his masculinity.

“For a young man, when I was 17, I’m trying to figure out who I am as a man and nothing in my culture gave me that except like the military," he said.

Looking back, he has also come to understand the bigger picture—that soldiers and the public they try to defend simply don’t see eye-to-eye.

"I think the military and the infantry is politically incorrectly. Their job is just to kill as effectively and quickly as possible. Well, that’s the exact opposite of how it works in the day-to-day culture in America. Like, if someone has a problem you try to talk it out, you try to come to some consensus. Well, that philosophy is the inverse of war and that’s why people don’t understand it.”

For Jayson, the healing actually began while he was still stationed in Iraq, where he started to sense that his humanity was deeply intertwined with the humanity of the ordinary Iraqis he came across every day. On his second tour of duty, he brought a camera along and in 2010 self-published a book of photographs. Children of War was put on exhibit last year on the USC campus. He recovers the book from underneath a pile of newspapers on his coffee table and thumbs through the pages stopping at an image of a young girl.

"The girl with the green sweater, you can see me in her eyes. As I look at her I’m looking back at myself and that’s really what this whole thing was about. I was basically trying to counteract what Iraq did to me through taking these pictures, I was basically fighting all the feelings or the loss of feelings and trying to recapture my humanity."

Marcos Soltero, a former adviser with the VA, says that understanding one’s own experience which Jayson started through his photography is what college can help do for others.

“For some of these younger veterans… that might have joined straight out of high school…who really don’t know how to comprehend what they’re going through … that education puts them in a place where they can cycle through that and comprehend their experience or what happened to them," said Soltero.

Take Jayson’s experience and multiply it by thousands because last December 8,000 troops left Iraq. Many of them, like Jayson, will try the classroom.

"The trick is to find a way in which you take those experiences that seem incomprehensible and you can’t find anything good and meaningful about them and integrate them into something in which they become very important and significant. And then when that takes place you’re not a victim. I actually have more humanity now than people here because I know more about what it is to be a human being."