Longhorn Veterans Share What It’s Like to go From the Military to Civilian Life at UT

A little over a year ago, I sat with a former Marine sniper in the lobby of the LBJ School, passing time between panels at the first-ever Vietnam War Summit. A Longhorn, he was relaying to me the reasons for his enlistment in 1969, explaining that every man in his family, from his grandfather to his father to his five brothers, had served. “Every generation has its war,” he told me. For his, it was modern history’s most gruesome battles in the jungles of Vietnam; for others, it was the fight against the Nazi regime on German soil; and for those of the current generation, it was the the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, after 9/11.