From Combat to College

With the end of the War in Iraq, tens of thousands of soldiers have returned home, and many of them are going to college. But the transition to academia can be hard. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson (Virginia Military Institute) are traveling the country, coaching professors on how to welcome and support veterans. Also featured: Kurt Vonnegut’s experience as a World War II POW informed his writing decades later. A new biography, by Charles J. Shields (University of Mary Washington), about the iconic countercultural author is called And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life. The man who emerges in the book is not the man his readers believed him to be.