Sgt. Matthew Marsh Transitions From Convoy Commander in Iraq to UMd. Student

When Matthew Marsh enrolled as a mechanical engineering student at the University of Maryland, he wasn’t like many of the other freshmen around him.

At 22 years old, he was older than most of them. He was a newlywed.

And he had been in Fallujah, where he froze in shock as mortars rained down on the other side of a wall from where he was standing.

At the time, he was serving in Iraq as a sergeant of the Marine Corps. Over his seven-month deployment in 2006, he led as a convoy commander and helped train the Iraqi military.

They were stressful and challenging experiences, indeed, but in August 2008, he faced a new kind of challenge. For the first time in more than five years, Marsh sat in a classroom.

“I had a hard time relating with students who were in the same grade with me, but were five years younger than me,” he said.

His classmates had just finished strolling the halls of high school, while Marsh had navigated tanks in Iraq, hoping explosives weren’t beneath him. His peers were at the stage when they wanted to party. Marsh wasn’t interested.

For four years of active duty, every part of Marsh’s life was regimented. A higher rank was always there to tell him what to do, when to do it, and how to look while doing it. Meanwhile, everyone around him was falling in line as well.

At the University of Maryland, it wasn’t like that. Although the military had helped him become self-sufficient in one respect, providing a paycheck, health care, and later funding for his education, he now had to make many more decisions on his own.

It turned out that the biggest challenge of serving in the Marine Crops, was no longer serving actively. First, there was all this new free time.

“I didn’t really know what to do,” he said. Later, that time became filled with family, studying, gym time and an hour-and-a-half commute to and from school.

In his freshman year, the first president of a new student veteran organization, Terp Vets, took him under his wing.

“When I first met Matt, I could really tell he was overwhelmed,” Kirby Bowing said.

Bowing himself has served in the Air Force since 1990, and in active duty from 1996 to 2002. He has been deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and now he’s pursing a doctorate degree at Maryland.

He said a lot of veterans have a hard time transitioning when they enter school. While irresponsibility means failing a test for most students, a lot of veterans have been in situations where unaccountability can lead to death, he said.

“You can’t talk to just anyone about that … Sometimes they just don’t get it,” Bowing said.

In addition to serving as a community for veterans, Terp Vets has organized brown bag events, guided professors in teaching military members, and conducted fundraisers for homeless veterans.

The organization resulted out of a multidisciplinary task force at the university, formed to explore the various needs of veteran students.

“The university has been really great in taking a look at those things,” Bowing said.

And now veterans not only have a group to unite them, but a new place to hang out.

A large grant from a 1961 graduate and former secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, was recently used to create the University of Maryland Veteran Center, inside the Cole Student Activities Building.

Inside is a lounge with a flat-screen television and PlayStation console, kitchen, office, and computers hooked up to devices called cac readers, which allow veterans to use their military identification cards to access a secure military network.

Fluttering about the center on Thursday afternoon were lots of student veterans, enjoying an ice cream social together.

Hanging on one wall were T-shirts from the university, marking each year of Terp Vets’ existence; there are just four.

“There are still a lot of growing pains right now,” Marsh said of the young organization. “But we’ve come a long way.”

Just as he had.

Since becoming more involved with Terp Vets, Marsh learned to relate to other students despite the different ages and experiences.

Others have noticed a difference in Marsh, too.

“I haven’t really seen him change; just blossom and grow,” Bowing said.