Marines Go Green

WHEN BRENDAN JAMES Hart '10 graduated high school in Rockland County, New York, he was set adrift. He took a few college courses and thought about joining the New York City fire department.

Instead, in 2003 he enlisted in the Marines. After excelling in basic training and at infantry school at Camp Geiger, North Carolina, Hart was selected to the Marines' elite Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team. In August 2004 he was off to Guantanamo Bay, where he spent four months guarding the perimeter of the detention facility. Next was Iraq. As he prepared to deploy he was given a smallpox vaccination that left him hooked to a ventilator after an adverse reaction.

Hart thought he would bounce back and decided to join his team in Iraq. "Things got substantially worse when I got there," he recalls. "I ended up spending most of the time in a field hospital." Hart was sent back to the States, confined to a wheelchair at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, with a hip eroded by steroid treatments. During his long days there he decided to return to college at the University of Maryland as one of 300 wounded and ailing veterans enrolled there. What he found was anger about the war and disdain for those who had served.

Meanwhile, Dartmouth President Jim Wright, a Marine, had been spending time at Walter Reed, too—visiting wounded vets and coming to the conclusion that a counseling program to help them get into college was needed.

Wright brought his concerns to the American Council of Education (ACE). With ACE on board, Wright quietly assumed responsibility for raising the $300,000 needed to get such a program off the ground. After ABC News turned its spotlight on the program last summer, Hart, with help from his University of Maryland advisor, connected with ACE—and, by phone, with Wright.

Now Hart, wanting to be near his classrooms, is living in Massachusetts Hall as a 25-year-old sophomore, intent upon studying history and public policy—and interested in getting involved in campus politics.

Wright says Hart's application—as well as those submitted by Samuel Taylor Crist '10, Greg Agron '11 and a fourth Marine who will defer admission to take more time adjusting to a prosthesis were judged on their merits. "The worst and cruelest thing to do would be to admit someone who is not prepared to be here," Wright says. But these vets have been given one advantage: "I've given them my home phone number," says Wright. "I've told them, and at least one of their mothers, that I'm going to be available to them."

"A lot of my buddies were getting out of the military and not going to school," says Hart, "and that was partly because they were not being given the opportunity.

Brendan Hart

OVERHEARD

Dartmouth is not owned by any group. Alumni have had a longstanding responsibility that they share with faculty, students and the administration, a responsibility to look to the well-being of the College." PRESIDENT JAMES WRIGHT