Years before he had to get up for 10 a.m. courses, Patrick Young had to be awake at dawn for the grueling drills of Marine boot camp. Before he wrestled with questions of faith and ethics in a Towson University classroom, he faced them on the battlefield, with bullets whizzing past and thoughts of dead friends on his mind.
Young, 27, would be one of the more noteworthy seniors graduating Friday regardless. At Towson, he triple-majored in religion, philosophy and political science. At times, he carried three jobs to go with his three majors. Oh, and he minored in drama, appearing in a campus production of "The Crucible" and performing at the Timonium Dinner Theatre. And don't forget the semester in Italy, where he proposed to his girlfriend in one of the world's most romantic cities.
But before all that, he was a Marine in Iraq, dodging bullets as he cleared house after house on the way into the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
Early in his time at Towson, Young realized that he no longer had much in common with the average 18-year-old. But he identified strongly with the dozens of other veterans he encountered, so he helped to found an organization for the 300 or so at Towson. They have their own center now, and Young hopes to land a job as the liaison between the university and its former soldiers. If that goes well, he'd like to become a regional and national leader in helping veterans to pursue the kind of education he has received.
"I always thought I wanted to do something to continue the mission that wasn't done when I was in Iraq," he says.
The dropout rate for veterans is similar to that for other students. That nags at Young, because with the right federal grants, a former soldier can essentially make $2,000 a month to go to college full time.
"A vet dropping out doesn't seem right," he says. "I think we can turn the tide. I see it as a need that's going to be in place for a while, so there's no reason I shouldn't be the one to help it be met."
"They really do trust him," says his fiancee, Meghan Walton, of Young's fellow veterans. "He will fight for them. I think this could be almost like closure for him."
'You're going to war'
Young grew up in Catonsville, hanging out at the Knights of Columbus hall down the street and listening to the older men tell their stories of wars long past. His grandfather served in the Navy during World War II and his father was in the Air Force just before the Vietnam War. Young always assumed he would follow in their footsteps, to the point that he neglected his studies at Mount St. Joseph High School. A month and a half after graduation in 2001, he landed at Marine boot camp in Parris Island, S.C.
He didn't think much about combat because "who would be dumb enough to attack us?"
One day, two months into boot camp, an odd commotion broke out and a drill instructor barked at Young and his cohorts, "You better shut your mouths, because after today, you're going to war."
News trickled in of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"Then, it just got real," Young says of his service. "I was second-guessing myself over the whole situation. I was scared. Everybody was."
He was first deployed to Iraq in March 2003. He did some patrolling but stayed for barely a month. "We felt like we missed it," he says of the war.
But he went back in June 2004. He spent months patrolling and providing security for a dam and then, late that year, U.S. forces massed to attack Fallujah. Young's unit headed straight down the center. He remembers the darkness of that night, his sergeant's exhortations to "get 'em back" for all the Americans lost, the dead silence when rounds began flying in and out of the city.
He lost all sense of time during the first days of the invasion. The Marines couldn't walk down the bomb-infested roads, so they busted into each house, cleared it and moved to the next via roof or courtyard.
Young appreciated the honesty of the combat because the Marines were invading a city filled with hardened warriors. They weren't having to glance over their shoulders for innocent-looking civilians who might be hiding bombs.
"It was a really good fight," he says. "It was the way the whole war should've been."
He tried not to step back and contemplate what they were doing. But he "lost it" when news came that Nick Ziolkowski, a sniper from Towson, had been killed nearby. The two loved to share cigars sent by Ziolkowski's dad, and they had plans to rent a house from Ziolkowski's brother after the war. Young knew how badly Ziolkowski wanted to see his niece. "I was the one who thought about dying," he says. "He just wanted to get home."
"It was so weird because you knew the whole funeral had gone on, but you're still there," he says. "There wasn't even time to breathe. There would be time to mourn everybody later."
After a month, they had taken the city. Young had the surreal experience of driving back, undisturbed, past all the houses he had fought so hard to take. He knew in his gut that he'd survive the war but he also knew that, with Ziolkowski gone, he had no idea what to do next.
Getting 'his life in order'
Young arrived home in the spring of 2005, just before his 22nd birthday. He had saved enough money that he could sit in his rented house with three pieces of furniture and a few pots and pans and watch TV for months. People asked him what he was doing. "Nothing," he usually said.
"It took him a while to get to a place where he could think about school, to get his life in order," says Ziolkowski's mother, Tracy Miller.
He found some purpose acting at the dinner theater and finally called Miller, who works as an academic adviser at Towson, about college. She helped him gain admission for the spring semester of 2006.
Back when he graduated from high school, Young figured he would just squander his parents' money on booze and parties if he went to college. But this time around, he found school infinitely easier. His fellow freshmen dragged through 10 a.m. classes, but he had already been up for three hours by then. If he had a problem, he talked it through with the professor, like an adult.
"You show up, do what they say and pass the test," he says. "It wasn't rocket science. I couldn't remember why it seemed so hard before."
In fact, he balanced classes with a construction job, working as a bouncer, bartending and an online gig chasing pirates who used night-vision equipment to record and sell hit movies.
He had also begun dating Walton, whom he met when they sang a duet in a high school production of "The Sound Of Music." They weren't a couple back then (he was too much of a partier and a ladies' man, she says). But she wrote him faithfully throughout his time overseas. He surprised her last year by whipping out a diamond ring in the middle of St. Mark's Square in Venice. They plan to marry this summer.
Finding answers in studies
Young started at Towson as a religion major, wanting to know more about the Islamic culture he had encountered in Iraq and to explore the reasons why he had lost the Catholic beliefs of his youth. He decided that religion tended to reply to unanswered questions by asking for faith, and "That wasn't good enough for me anymore."
"I wasn't going to find the answers," he says. "But that was OK. I wanted to find the questions that would lead to more questions." Such thinking led him naturally to philosophy, which became his second major. Through his study of Aristotle and Plato, he became fascinated with philosophy's influence on politics. So why not major in political science as well?
"They're all interconnected," he says. "One of the big problems with America is that we don't connect the idea of religion and politics like they do in the Middle East. How can we deal with that part of the world when people don't even understand that for them, it would be sacrilegious to set up a government without religion?"
And of course, he couldn't forget how much he loved getting on stage and talking to a crowd in the voice of another character. So he needed a theater minor to round out his education.
Walton thought he was a little crazy for taking on so much. "But whatever he puts his mind to, he does," she says. "Whatever he wants, he gets."
A campus veterans group
Young has occasionally walked by a campus anti-war protest and wondered, "Who are you to question our sacrifices?" But he believes too strongly in free expression to shout anyone down. He has never faced disrespect from fellow students. Mostly, they thank him or ask questions. Some have even interviewed him about his experiences for other classes.
As he encountered other veterans in his classes, Young realized they shared experiences and perspectives that younger students couldn't understand. He thought his peers needed a gathering place and that such a center could also be a resource for returning veterans who wanted to investigate the grants and benefits available to them. So he and Miller helped found the Veterans Group of Towson University.
Miller was excited to watch Young become a leader on issues that were also close to her heart.
"After Nick was killed, I wanted to continue what he started," she says. "I couldn't do anything for him but maybe I could for others like him. I see Pat as another son that way. The reason he wanted to join the Marines was to make the world better, and he's doing it."
One thing Young didn't do was dwell on his war experiences as he threw himself into classes.
"It always affects me," Young says of his time in Iraq. "But what I've learned hasn't changed my perspective on what happened. I think of it as a memory, and I'm at peace with it."