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Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus by Ellen Moore (review)

O ver the past decade, colleges have seen increasing numbers of students who are veterans, many of whom have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have responded by developing services to help these students adjust to academic life. It is the nexus of these students and services that provides the subject of Ellen Moore’s insightful new book, Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus. In Grateful Nation, Moore argues that university faculty and administrators fail to distinguish between helping student veterans adapt to the academy and providing unquestioning support for the institution of the military as well as the prosecution of the current wars. They also fail to recognize how veterans differ from one another. To make these points, Grateful Nation lets veterans speak for themselves. It is based on three years of qualitative research, most intensively at a community and a four-year college, but also at seven other institutions of higher education. It draws on ethnographic observation of events, meetings, and classes involving veterans. Moore also interviewed fifty former service members who were deployed internationally over the past decade and a half, including some who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the book, Moore directly confronts the assertion that university faculty and students are hostile to veterans, and that this hostility accounts for some of the documented difficulties that veterans have adjusting to the academic environment. According to her argument, administrators and advocates assume that questioning these wars is seen as antagonistic by veterans. They therefore equate help for veterans with support for the military and for the conflicts. As a consequence, they advise university personnel to silence discussion of military policy and practice, and tacitly to present the armed forces as superior to civilian society. Yet, Moore found no evidence of this supposed hostility in three years of observation. Rather, she argues, faculty and students generally support veterans even when they may disagree with military policy.