WSU honors veterans in ceremony

Four veterans of the U.S. military – including one WSU student and one alumnus – spoke Tuesday morning to commemorate their peers and to remind others what Veteran’s Day is really about.

The ceremony took place in the CUB Auditorium and was hosted by the ASWSU’s Student Veterans Committee. The first to speak there was Sgt. Jermiha White of the U.S. Army, a junior human development major.

White said this day should be about celebrating veterans, explaining how he came to understand the holiday as one for honoring military service.

As a child, he said, Veteran’s Day was simply an occasion for spending time with family. Two of his grandfathers served in the Korean War, and his great-grandfather served in World War II.

“It never really meant anything to me,” he said. “It was about getting out of school and going to my grandparents’ house.” 

But as he matured and with his grandfather’s death, White said, Veteran’s Day became a time of sorrow and mourning – a perception he held until enlisting in 2005.

Now, after seven years of active-duty status and three deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 28-year-old is earning his bachelor’s degree. He enrolled at WSU in 2013 shortly after returning to the U.S. from Spin Boldak, Afghanistan.

Senior Master Sgt. Michael Young of the U.S. Air Force said he particularly admires student veterans, who are “more qualified than most” to balance academic demands with service to their country.

Cpt. Anthony Roubal of the U.S. Marine Corps said veterans returning from Afghanistan have had an especially hard time relating to people at home due to a general lack of understanding.

Despite widespread use of technology and news media, Roubal said, many civilians hold a “false sense of knowing” about the U.S. military’s role overseas. He noted that, on one recent occasion, a doctor asked if Roubal would be deployed to Iraq, where no U.S. forces have been stationed since late 2011.

For reasons such as this, he said, some veterans “have got a big chip on their shoulder.”

 “These men and women have placed their country above themselves, and many times at the cost of their health,” Lt. Col. Justin Haynes of the U.S. Army said.

Haynes, who graduated from WSU in 1995 “at the tail end of the Cold War,” has served 13 deployments since he enlisted shortly afterward and remains on active duty.

He thanked his friends and family by saying, “We veterans know that we could not have survived without you or your support.”

Young said in preparing to speak at the ceremony, he thought hard about how he could pay tribute to veterans and fellow active-duty service men and women.

“I felt the weight not only of my 24 years of service, but also of decades of service of all you who have served,” he said.

The ceremony ended with a poem about prisoners of war and soldiers who have gone missing in action, and a moment of silence in 30-degree weather on the Terrell Mall.​

*This story has been updated to correct inaccurate information.