It’s just two different people.”Īmong the approximately 800,000 military veterans now attending U.S. They’re more worried about what they’re going to be wearing to school tomorrow, or the spring break that’s coming up. “They really don’t realize how precious life can be, how it can go away in the drop of a dime. “At 19, I was in combat as opposed to trying to go find a party,” said Velasquez, injured before he came home. Deeper, there was a vast cultural chasm between other freshmen and the survivor of multiple firefights and risky missions. Instead of taking strategic lecture notes or studying highlights in the syllabus when prepping for exams, he scribbled nearly every word his professors uttered and tried to absorb every fact in his textbooks. Velasquez hadn’t been in a classroom for more than five years. He is pictured on the bottom, second from the right, with his Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers. Lucas Velasquez enrolled at Columbus State University in Georgia after retiring from the Navy. He promptly failed four of his first six classes. In 2007, after retiring from the Navy, Velasquez, then 23, enrolled at Columbus State University in western Georgia. In uniform, Velasquez was smart and quick, adept at practicing field medicine literally while under the gun. troops and more than 1,350 insurgents were killed in Fallujah during Operation Phantom Fury, Velasquez routinely rendered emergency aid to wounded Marines while ducking bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and IED blasts. During a pair of six-month stints in and around Fallujah, Iraq –- then a fiercely volatile city –- Navy corpsman Lucas Velasquez came to know about life.įrom late 2005 through early 2007, not long after nearly 100 U.S.
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