Most students take a path to the Gothic Wonderland that goes something like this: four frantic years of AP classes, an alphabet soup of college entrance exams, prom, graduation and then freshman year.
But a few students make time to cram in something else too: military service.
Before they roomed on East Campus, these students bunked in barracks, and before they did problem sets, they fired M-16s. And whether they are international students who were conscripted into mandatory service or Americans who volunteered, they bring to campus a bewildering array of experiences completely foreign to most of their peers.
But the things that change your life aren't always things you want to talk about. And serving in the military doesn't exactly make for easy dinnertime conversation. Where do you start to explain to someone who has never been there the deep pride of serving your country or the terror of combat? How do you convey what it's like to spend all your time with the same small group of people, sharing meals and living quarters and homesickness? Or explain the day-to-day boredom and inertia of being a soldier to someone who has never been anything but a student?
Still, for whatever Duke vets are or are not saying about their service, being in the military isn't something you just put behind you the day you call it quits. And for these students, their time as soldiers still informs how they see their world and their campus, from big-picture issues like their views on politics right down to the intricacies of college social life.
For 22-year-old freshman Paul Salem, his journey to the military started back in 2004, when he was a senior at the prestigious Maret School in Washington D.C.
While his classmates were composing their Common Application masterpieces and scrounging for college recommendations, he felt restless with the idea of four more years of calculus problems and Faulkner analyses.
Outside Maret's structered walls, he watched as conflict escalated dramatically in Iraq. By January 2004, 500 Americans had been killed and, to Salem, it was "starting to look pretty crappy" in Baghdad. Several thousand miles away he felt something in himself stir.
"I spent a lot of time thinking about it," he says. "I was sort of obsessed with it."
So obsessed in fact, that he decided he needed to do something huge. That spring, as his friends finalized their college plans, he enlisted in the Marines. The decision sparked a flurry of opposition from friends and family. One stunned English teacher admitted he hadn't had a student enlist since Vietnam. His parents begged him not to go.
"I don't think anyone wanted me to do it," he says.
But it didn't matter. This was the defining conflict of Salem's life, of his generation, of his country, and he wasn't going to sit on the sidelines, he says. He spent his 19th birthday in basic training and less than a year later, he was in Iraq.
And he wasn't exactly serving grits in the Green Zone. Salem found himself in Fallujah, the city where American troops and Iraqi insurgents had clashed in one of the bloodiest battles of the war only a year before Salem's arrival. There, as a member of the Second Battalion, Second Marines, he cleared bombs from the dangerous supply routes that snaked their way in and out of the city.
"[When I was in Iraq] I didn't care about how the war was going overall," he says. "It really didn't matter to me what the national politics were. I cared about who got hit, where, when, how did it happen and how can it not happen to me. What mattered to me was making sure that we got home okay, and that was it."
And somewhere in the midst of his third and final year of service, from a base in the Mojave Desert, he made the time to do something he had been putting off. He applied to college.
"I finally had something to write about," he says.
But Salem isn't talking about his time in Iraq much these days. It's a touchy subject and anyway, he has a lot on his plate even without the baggage of being a veteran.
It's called freshman year.
And while he sometimes may feel a little isolated watching spates of giggling freshmen totter to the East Campus bus stop late on a Friday night, Salem isn't the only one on campus with the military in his past.
Take, for example, the intelligence officer who briefed those in power on international affairs. Or the platoon leader who knows how to rappel out of a moving helicopter.
Not exactly your typical resume talking points.
"People say, 'Oh cool, did you kill anyone?'" says David Thian, 24, a senior who served for two and a half years in the Singaporean military before coming to Duke.
He usually just shrugs the question off.
As other vets are quick to point out, being in the army isn't all target practice and standing at attention. When freshman Leigh Libling, 20, began her service in the Israeli military in 2006, she spent the first nine months doing menial tasks in the office of a high-ranking official.
"We were in charge of serving coffee," she says, shrugging. But the work still instilled in her a sense of patriotism and national pride, and after nine months and a few thousand cups of coffee, she was promoted to become an administrative assistant.
She says she never fired a gun after basic training and in many ways, her two years of service resembled a civilian job more than an army post.
But she's not complaining. Anyway, there would be no point.
Libling joined the army because she had to. The draft card arrived in her mailbox one day when she was 16, and she never questioned it. Israel has a conscript army and every young adult is required to serve. So when Libling was accepted to Duke during her senior year, she said yes, but with a caveat: She needed two years off to be in the military first.
That may seem like an uncommon request, but the Office of Admissions is accustomed to hearing it, says Anne Sjostrom, the admissions officer in charge of international students.
"We recognize that it's something that a lot of international students have to do, and they don't really have a choice," she says.
A diverse array of nations, from Finland and Germany to South Korea and Taiwan, conscript their citizens-though sometimes only males-when they reach a certain age. Only a handful do not allow students to delay their service until after college.
One in particular has a strong presence at Duke: Singapore. Sjostrom says that every year, approximately 10 male students arrive at Duke fresh out of their service in the Singaporean military.
The island nation-state in southeast Asia has not been engaged in active military conflict since World War II, but it still requires every male citizen to serve a three-year stint in the armed forces when they finish junior college-the equivalent of high school.
"A lot of us serve because we have to," says senior Enping Hong, 23. "Some of us serve because we want to too, but I'm not one of those people."
After three months of basic training and a break-neck nine months in officer school-one of the shortest officer trainings in the world-Hong spent the rest of his service in charge of a platoon at a facility that gave physical tests to members of the Army reserves.
Thian spent his days reading international news and preparing briefings for officers. Another Singaporean at Duke, sophomore JianWei Gan, 21, ran a supply team that ferried supplies to different military installments in the country.
But no fighting, and definitely no war.
Even without having been engaged in active combat, making the transition from military life to a college campus isn't always smooth. Like any freshman, military vets are navigating the first-year maze-learning which stations to avoid at the Marketplace, what spots in Lilly Library are the quietest and how to pack an unseemly number of people into a single C-1 bus.
Like their more traditional classmates, they're inundated with a barrage of new faces on their halls and in their classes, fellow freshmen eager to befriend one of their own. But when you've just spent three years in the military, there's something in particular you notice about a lot of the members of your class.
They're women.
Females aren't nonexistent in the military-after all Leigh Libling was drafted alongside her classmates. But women are certainly the minority in the armed forces of most nations. Without women, men in the military often egg each other on, ratcheting up their crassness and aggression.
The environment is "much more even tempered" with women around, Salem says gratefully. "It definitely improves the quality of life."
Then there's the age gap. Being the 21 year old dropped in a swarm of 18 year olds can be equal parts difficult and amusing. For one thing, older students all find themselves the target of a single, persistent request in the dry halls of East Campus.
"People will come banging on your door for booze," Hong says.
A lot of students go through a "crazy drinking phase" when they first get to college, says Gan, a fact that often catches older students off-guard, especially those from other countries who have been able to drink legally for years.
Outside of section parties and Tailgate, however, the age gap shrinks. Because of Duke's geographical stratification, many older students make friends with their class on East instead of the upperclassmen on West and Central who are actually closer to their age.
"My friends call me old man," Hong says, laughing. But he is quick to point out that the age difference never proved much of a barrier. "I was as old as a senior, but I felt like a freshman."
And at no point does a student feel more like a freshman, the new, unseasoned recruit of the college world, than when it comes time to choose classes. But here vets seem to have a leg up on their younger peers.
Although a kid straight out of high school might spend years in college picking their way through a tangle of theoretical career options, vets have already experienced the work world firsthand. Salem knew he wanted to be a doctor from the day he arrived at Duke, not just because it seemed like a way to help people but because he had seen firsthand the important work of trauma personnel in Iraq.
For Gan, his time in the military simply clarified what he didn't want, and that was a highly-structured job that left little room for creativity. Libling says that after serving she sometimes feels her priorities are "just different" than other freshmen's.
Being just a little different is a feeling she and other vets at Duke will probably never shake. After all, they've been a part of an establishment that is probably more of an abstract concept for most Duke students than a living, breathing part of their lives.
What's okay to ask about someone's time in the military and what's off-limits? Vets say that blurry boundary is often navigated by simply staying silent. They don't volunteer the sensitive experiences, and for the most part, people don't ask.
"It doesn't come up as much as you'd think," says junior Nigel Cheong, 23, a Singaporean vet.
And in the end, student vets don't necessarily want to dwell too much on the past.
They have a lot of things to deal with here at Duke. Salem had his first chemistry exam a few weeks ago. It went well, but he knows there's always room for improvement. So after he got back his grade, he made a note in his planner to review his notes and study habits. In true military style, it read: "Conduct after-action on chem test."
Some habits are hard to kick.
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