It usually happens at a house party, or at a bar.

The swirl of people, the commotion, the hollering – they take Marla Keown back to a time, just a couple of years ago, when she was a skinny 23-year-old driving trucks through the deserts of Iraq.

She feels what it was like to drive down the streets of Baghdad, listening to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells,” wondering if the next bridge she drove over would be the one to blow up and kill her. Or the night in Fallujah, when the mortar shells were so close overhead she could feel them as they woke her from her sleep.

Keown signed up for the Army Reserves so she could go to college. But the Army ended up taking her out of college instead, at least for a year.

She’s been back 21 months, and she’s a student again at Kansas University. But life still isn’t the same.

“You can’t come out of a situation like that unscathed,” Keown says. “It’s still weird, being back.”

This Veterans Day, there are 235 former military personnel enrolled at KU. Some, like Keown, find it’s not easy to go from being a soldier to being a student.

‘I could die’

Keown is 25 now, and she’s taking classes with 18-year-olds who haven’t seen military battle. Most of her friends have graduated.

Now, it feels like she’s in class with little kids. They often ask if she shot anyone while she was in Iraq.

It’s not like Keown – whose name is pronounced “COW-an” – asked to go to Iraq. She signed up for the Army Reserves in 2001, before the terrorist attacks and before any mention of war in the Middle East.

It had been two years since she had graduated from Topeka High School, and a year after dropping out of Kansas State University. She knew the GI Bill was her ticket to go back to school.

She was in her fourth semester at KU when she was activated.

“Every mission I went on, I thought, ‘I could possibly die on this mission,'” Keown says. “But when it came down to the thick of it, during those moments when you could die, adrenaline got you through. You don’t really think about it.”

PTSD troubles

She thought about it more starting in February 2005, after she returned home. She cried every day. And when she started back to school, the big classrooms and hanging out with friends made her edgy.

“I pretty much put it on me being a girl,” Keown says. “I didn’t want to be a pussy. … When we were in Iraq, I was one of the guys.”

Her mother, Sandy Chitwood, first realized the extent of her daughter’s pain when she walked into a restaurant restroom and heard her sobbing.

“She says, ‘I don’t like crowds, mom. I still think someone might pop up and kill me,'” Chitwood says. “Here’s this 25-year-old, cute-looking thing – I think – who looks like that, and this is what she has going on in her head.”

Now, Keown spends Mondays at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Topeka, getting counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder.

She still has trouble sleeping, and she takes frequent smoke breaks when she’s hanging out with friends, just to get away from the noise. In a war, noise means only bad things.

“She doesn’t fit in,” her mother says. “She doesn’t fit in with her age group, because she’s been through too much. Most of her friends have graduated. Where does she go?”

Coping with classes

Justin Montgomery, 24 is familiar with that feeling of not fitting in.

Like Keown, Montgomery served a year in Iraq with a transportation division, also with the Army. When he returned in May 2004, most of his friends had graduated.

“People don’t realize that, how much of your friend base leaves,” Montgomery says. “It’s one thing to be in class with people one or two years younger, but you start being around people three years younger or more, and the level of maturity is different.”

Montgomery, a business major graduating in December, says he’s become a more serious student since he’s been back. His GPA has gone up from a 2.9 to a 3.3. If he could stay up 48 hours straight on a mission, he figures, what excuse does he have not to be in class?

That’s also the philosophy of Josh Monteiro, a 30-year-old KU law student who returned from Iraq in April 2004.

“Some people say law school is real stressful, and I hear stories about people committing suicide if they get bad grades,” Monteiro says. “I said this to my class, and it rubbed people the wrong way, but stress is when you’re driving down the road, worried about getting blown up. That’s stress.”

Monteiro admits that spending a year in Iraq, where soldiers are trained to be on guard around the Iraqi people, initially made him wary around students at KU who are from the Middle East. Now, he says, that’s worn off – his best friend from law school is from Iran.

Falling behind

Lt. Col Bruce Woolpert, a JAG officer with the Kansas National Guard in Topeka, says one of the greatest frustrations of students called to active duty is getting sidetracked with school.

“The government doesn’t deploy or not deploy depending on semester time frames,” Woolpert says. “You could lose a year of school in addition to the year you’re deployed. That would be psychologically very difficult to deal with, feeling like you’re behind.”

Joan Hahn, an assistant registrar at KU, says the university doesn’t offer any specific program for helping returning soldiers deal with re-enrolling. A soldier – like anyone who drops out of school for a semester or more – has to apply for admission to the university a second time.

A new student group, Collegiate Veterans Assn., has formed and is working to promote issues for former military personnel. One such issue is persuading bookstores to allow students to keep books on credit longer, since military payments often are delayed.

Affected by war

Keown is trying to leave her bad memories behind. It’s tough, though, because she’s still in the reserves, and there’s a chance she could get called back to Iraq in the future.

She figures she has at least another year left in school, maybe more. She’s majoring in photojournalism, and she’s on the staff of the University Daily Kansan.

“I think she’s talented,” says Tim Janicke, a photojournalism lecturer. “I think whatever she did there (in Iraq) has led her to be brave as a photographer, and not to be intimidated by unarmed people in the United States.”

Keown just wants to be another student. But when she looks around campus, she knows she’s not, not with the memories of war in her head.

“I’ve been back for a year and a half, and it’s not much more vague than when I first came back,” she says. “So I’ve pretty much come to believe it will stay with me for the rest of my life.

“But I don’t see how people can go through experiences like war and not have it stick with you. If it doesn’t, I guess you’d have to be inhuman, not to be affected by that.”