By Jackie Ogburn

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Sanford School Dean Bruce Kuniholm, who was a U.S. Marine rifle platoon commander during the Vietnam War, moderated the panel. It was organized by the Living Policy Forum, a student organization.

Duke HR News

Destruction from decades of war and poverty surrounded Duke nurse Frank Walsh when he arrived in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan.

A lieutenant with the U.S. Navy Reserve,Walsh was deployed last year as part of a Navy Medical Service Corps training team that included health care workers, logistics experts and administrators from across the country.

While embedded for a year with an Afghan National Army unit, Walsh and his team served as mentors for Afghan doctors, created a bilingual PowerPoint training guide for Afghan medics and built a small clinic to treat wounded American, Afghan and NATO soldiers.

"Many Afghan doctors' educations had been interrupted under the Taliban regime," said Walsh, 54, who returned from duty this summer. "Their skills and technology were lacking in many ways, but the Afghan military personnel were very open and friendly, and seemed thankful for our assistance."

Walsh is among 36 Duke staff and faculty who have taken military leave from Duke since 2004. Duke's military leave policy allows benefits-eligible employees to take time for military training and active duty assignments and return to work within 90 days of military discharge.

By: David Jarmul

10/23/09

DURHAM, N.C. -- The new names engraved on a wall between Duke Chapel and the Divinity School were once Duke students who walked on the very same ground before serving in the military and sacrificing their lives for their country, President Richard H. Brodhead said at a Friday morning ceremony to commemorate the addition of 54 names to the wall at Memorial Quad.

It was a “particularly poignant occasion because we’re remembering members of our family, the Duke family,” Brodhead said to about 250 people assembled, including mothers and others holding roses in memory of their sons and other fallen relatives. “They were students then, not heroes.”

The ceremony was “sad but in a good way,” said Grace Kohut, a current Duke student who accompanied her mother Linda Ram in honoring Maj. Cornelius H. Ram, Linda’s father who died in Vietnam when Linda was 14. All three generations of the family attended Duke – Cornelius Ram attended graduate school at Duke while also serving as an ROTC instructor. Grace said the ceremony was emotional for her mother, who was “reliving his death but is happy that he is getting his honor.”

By: Elad Gross

10/21/09

This Friday, Duke will rededicate and update the war memorial located between the Chapel and the Divinity School. Fifty-four names will be added to the list of Duke alumni who have been killed in service to their country.

The oldest graduated in 1937, the most recent in 2002. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gen. Eric Shinseki, Grad ’76, will be the special guest speaker. Shinseki is perhaps best known for his candid testimony in the Senate in 2006, when he advised the U.S. government to send many more troops into Iraq than the Bush administration was planning to. But what will likely be on Shinseki’s mind as he helps dedicate the memorial will be how close he was to making the list of Duke’s honored dead—Shinseki stepped on a land mine as a soldier in Vietnam and survived, losing part of his foot.

By: Lindsey Rupp

6/18/09

Effective Aug. 1, Duke will provide eligible veterans with $770,000 in cumulative annual financial aid from all of its schools, with matching aid from the Department of Veterans Affairs, University officials announced Wednesday.

The initiative is in response to the Yellow Ribbon Program of the Post-9/11 GI Bill to help veterans pursue their educational goals.

When University officials decided to join the voluntary program, they concluded that the benefits veterans bring to campus outweigh the financial cost, said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations.

By: Lindsey Rupp

7/1/09

The University has pledged $770,000 across all its schools to veterans as part of the Department of Veterans Affairs Yellow Ribbon Program. But only $15,000 will go to eligible undergraduate veterans-the bulk of the funds will go to those seeking graduate degrees.

The schools decided individually how much money each "could afford to spend" and how many eligible veterans it would offer the money to, said Alison Rabil, assistant vice provost and director of Financial Aid. The initiative supports veterans who meet the maximum service requirements of the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

The Pratt School of Engineering will provide $5,000 to one veteran and the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences pledged a total of $10,000 to two eligible veterans per year. But the Fuqua School of Business has offered the most so far with $17,500 per year going to each of its 25 qualifying veterans.

Michael McInerney, outgoing president of the Student Veteran's Association at Duke who graduated from the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy in May, said he was surprised the University did not allot more money for undergraduate use.

by John Massie 

February 16, 2009

Duke student veterans have been relatively unknown on campus-but that may soon change.

Michael McInerney, a second-year graduate student in public policy, recently started the Student Veteran's Association to give veterans more of a voice on campus.

The organization-also called DukeVets-is the first of its kind at Duke. Among its primary goals are to identify the number of undergraduate and graduate student veterans on campus, develop student veteran support services within the University and provide student veterans with a chance to network.

By Nancy E. Oates

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

New organization supports Duke military vets. 

Durham, NC -- U.S. Army Maj. Mike McInerney knows how to marshal the troops – even when they’re Duke staff members and fellow students.

Before the Duke-Navy football game last September, McInerney and more than 100 other Duke students with military backgrounds gathered for a tailgate party outside Wallace Wade Stadium. That simple gesture by Duke’s ROTC, student affairs and athletics departments to honor students with military affiliations may have forever changed campus life for Duke’s student veterans.

“I realized there were quite a few veterans at Duke that I didn’t know existed,” said McInerney, a graduate student. Before the tailgate party, he said, “I was one of only two at Duke I knew about.”

by Bridget Booher

January 2009

DUKE MAGAZINE

Incredible stories of Duke Veterans from World War Two.  Definitely worth a look.

January 2009

As members of the Duke community embarked on military service in World War II, Anne Walker Garrard '25, A.M. '30 made sure that every enlisted person had an index card on file at the Alumni Affairs office. Garrard, who served as assistant director of Alumni Affairs for more than three decades, kept meticulous records. Now housed off-site in a special storage facility, the nearly 7,000 index cards provide a glimpse into the harsh realities of war: young men taken prisoner and later liberated, pilots shot down and missing in action, the injured sent home to mend.

November 10, 2008
By Missy Baxter

Employees in military service get support back at work.

Destruction from decades of war and poverty surrounded Duke nurse Frank Walsh when he arrived in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan.

A lieutenant with the U.S. Navy Reserve,Walsh was deployed last year as part of a Navy Medical Service Corps training team that included health care workers, logistics experts and administrators from across the country.

Since 2004, 36 Duke staff and faculty have taken military leave from Duke for training and active duty assignments. Upon returning to Duke, staff and faculty receive a job equal in status, benefits and pay in accordance with federal and state laws. They also are credited with eligibility and benefit accruals.

"Many of our employees come back with even more talents and experience useful in their roles at Duke," said Dexter Nolley, director of Duke's Staff and Labor Relations. "With Veterans Day this month, it's an ideal time for us to reflect upon the dedication of staff and faculty who have served our country."

30 October 2008

Durham, NC -- If Jayme Johnson can find any piece of a silver lining in her mother’s struggle with bipolar disorder, it’s thanks to the GI Bill.

The third-year Duke graduate student began receiving $900 a month through the federal program after her mother, a 20-year Army veteran, was diagnosed with the disorder last December. Johnson, who is still paying off student loans from her undergraduate years at Carleton College in Minnesota, said her mother can no longer work or help her with school costs

30 October 2008

Duke nurse Frank Walsh, is among 36 Duke staff and faculty who have taken military leave from Duke since 2004. Duke's military leave policy allows benefits-eligible employees to take time for military training and active duty assignments and return to work within 90 days of military discharge.

By: Ryan Brown

10/28/2008

Most students take a path to the Gothic Wonderland that goes something like this: four frantic years of AP classes, an alphabet soup of college entrance exams, prom, graduation and then freshman year.

But a few students make time to cram in something else too: military service.

Before they roomed on East Campus, these students bunked in barracks, and before they did problem sets, they fired M-16s. And whether they are international students who were conscripted into mandatory service or Americans who volunteered, they bring to campus a bewildering array of experiences completely foreign to most of their peers.

But the things that change your life aren't always things you want to talk about. And serving in the military doesn't exactly make for easy dinnertime conversation. Where do you start to explain to someone who has never been there the deep pride of serving your country or the terror of combat? How do you convey what it's like to spend all your time with the same small group of people, sharing meals and living quarters and homesickness? Or explain the day-to-day boredom and inertia of being a soldier to someone who has never been anything but a student?

March 26, 2008

Third-year Duke Law students and military veterans Jade Totman and Chris Dodrill have worked for the past two years to establish the Veteran’s Assistance Project at Duke.

September 19, 2008
Duke University gave out 3,000 free tickets to active duty, retired, reserve, and veterans during their Military Appreciation Day to watch Duke beat Navy on Saturday, September 13th, 2008.

November 6, 2007
By Kristin Butler, The Chronicle
DURHAM, N.C.

When the rest of the country pauses to honor America's military personnel (both living and dead) next Monday, Duke University won't join in. There will be no on-campus remembrances a la 9/11 or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Classes will proceed as normal. Even our University calendar -- which advertises activities like an open house tour for the Home Depot Smart Home Nov. 12 -- makes no mention of the occasion.

Considering how much we have to honor, that sort of neglect is a University-wide disgrace. Veterans Day at Duke should be a time to acknowledge the service of thousands of former soldiers receiving treatment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, to remember our brave classmates serving overseas and, most important of all, to pay tribute to the thousands of selfless alumni who fought and died for our country in times of war.

Excuses abound for Duke's current policies, among them the difficulty of fitting federal holidays into a jam-packed academic year. But the thought that this university -- with its thriving ROTC programs and relatively large numbers of alumni in uniform -- does so little to recognize former students' courage and sacrifice is all but inconceivable. As we edge toward national Veterans Day festivities, there is still time to end a larger cycle of broken promises at Duke.

Let's start with the sorry state of our physical tributes to the fallen. At present, Duke has only one war memorial, a low wall dedicated to alumni killed in World War II. When it was built many decades ago, this humble remembrance stood against a grassy hill along the right side of the Chapel (recall that there was no Bryan Center, no engineering campus and no research labs behind West Campus back then).

Today, with the encroachment of the Westbrook Building and Goodson Chapel, the fixture stands as little more than an airshaft between large buildings. It appears on no campus map, is absent from guided tours and remains unnoticed by longtime students, faculty and employees alike. Over the past three years, I walked by that wall more than 500 times before noticing its purpose, largely assuming that it prevented soil erosion or honored Divinity School donors.

And it's not just the wall's low profile that rankles, either. Before this monument was dedicated in September 1993 (following an unexplained delay of more than 40 years), administrators announced that it would "bear the names of those students killed in World War II and subsequent wars." In the 14 years since, not a single name has been added, leaving soldiers killed in Korea, Vietnam and both Gulf Wars wholly without tribute.

Meanwhile, Duke administrators went on to effectively re-sell the University's only other war monument less than two years later. Donated in 1922, the Alumni Memorial Gym stood in honor of Trinity students who died in World War I for more than 70 years. But by the mid-1990s, the structure had become decrepit, prompting officials to rename it the Keith and Brenda Brodie Recreation Center in exchange for repairs and expansions. That Duke's tribute to fallen WWI alumni is one of only a handful of buildings on campus to ever meet this fate says something troubling about our institutional priorities.

For perspective, it's worth noting that this level of indifference is by no means common among our peers.

Recognizing the need for this type of unified, appropriate tribute two years ago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill officials raised $300,000 to expand their existing Memorial Hall into a tribute that acknowledges "these people were here, and now they're lost." Other institutions scatter smaller remembrances throughout their campuses, grouping the fallen by conflict.

No matter which tactic Duke favors, there is a clear need to do better by our war dead. Heroes like Lt. Charles "Buddy" Mason, a 1964 graduate who was killed in Vietnam in 1967, have waited more than 40 years for a place where friends can properly remember his "gracious" spirit. Others, like Sgt. James J. Regan, a standout men's lacrosse player who died last February in northern Iraq, underscore the importance of a space where current students can mourn a classmate described as "a best friend to everyone he knew."

A proper memorial will not make these untimely deaths any less tragic, just as on-campus observances will never repay the debt we all owe living veterans. But such efforts do show our collective gratitude for the sacrifices made by our classmates in uniform, along with our respect for the contributions they've made to the university. This Veterans Day, let's channel our admiration for Duke's current and former soldiers into a tradition that is finally worthy of their service.

(C) 2007 The Chronicle via U-WIRE