From the Desk of...

Flint Man...
From Camos to Campus

Jeremy N. Glasstetter

For many veterans, one of their toughest missions can be making the transition from military service to a college campus.

Jeremy N. Glasstetter understands that challenge and is working to make that transition easier for veterans in colleges throughout Michigan.

Glasstetter, an eight-year, service-disabled Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is a junior at The University of Michigan-Flint.

The Flint resident is the Michigan state director for the Student Veterans of America, a coalition of student veterans groups from college campuses around the United States.

"What I'm doing on campus is trying to remove the stigma that's existed since the Vietnam era," Glasstetter said during a recent interview at the UM-Flint campus in downtown Flint, Michigan.

"For the last 20 years, veterans have not been welcomed on campuses around the country. It is important for me to teach other students the reason why we volunteered to fight. It is service. We are serving them."

Glasstetter became involved in the Student Veterans of America while he still was in the Army, serving in Iraq.

After leaving the Army, he moved back to Flint, where he was born, enrolled at UM-Flint and started a local chapter of the Student Veterans of America.

Today the Flint chapter has about 50 members.

Nationwide, Student Veterans of America has more than 180 chapters and an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 members, he said. The national organization advocates and advances the issues of veterans on U.S. campuses, he said. The non-profit Student Veterans of America, founded in January 2008, has three primary missions, according to its Web site, studentveterans.org.

It is working to develop more student veteran groups, it is coordinating between existing student groups and it is advocating on behalf of student veterans at the local, state and national level. Details about the national group are available at (866) 320-3826 or via email at contact@studentveterans.org.

Glasstetter became state director of the Student Veterans of America in December 2008. Throughout Michigan, there currently are about 350 members of the organization, he said.

Many of the members in Michigan are recent veterans of the global war on terrorism. "They're brand new, right out of uniform," Glasstetter said.

He said he is getting lots of help from local chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and other veterans’ organizations.

He also has received help and advice from VetBiz Central, which is based in Flint, not far from the UM-Flint campus.

"Ed Ronders (director of VetBiz Central) and I really clicked," Glasstetter said. "He wanted to help me out any way he could. Since our first meeting, VetBiz has been one of the main pillars of support."

Ronders said VetBiz Central supports Glasstetter's efforts to open a veterans resource center on the UM-Flint campus. That center currently is under construction in the UM-Flint Pavilion building on campus.

"Jeremy deserves a lot of credit for his work," Ronders said. "He’s made incredible strides for veterans on the UM-Flint campus. Classes for veterans only, a resource center where veterans can meet and unwind. He’s truly a veterans advocate and, to me, it’s vital that our generation help Jeremy’s generation."

Once the center is completed, Ronders said, VetBiz hopes to be an active supporter, offering workshops on starting a business and other topics.

Glasstetter grew up in the Davison, a small town east of Flint, and graduated from high school there in 1993. After high school, he took classes for a couple of semesters at Saginaw Valley State University. Then he left, came home, got a job, got bored and "decided I needed to find myself," he said.

That search took him south to Florida, where he worked for three years assembling small airplanes. He was laid off on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorists attacks.

"I still had bills and I was upset about 9-11. So I decided to see what the military had to offer." He ended up joining the Army.

By November 2001 he was in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic training. Then it was on to Fort Eustis, Virginia, for a 32-week course at the Army aviation school, where he was trained to become a helicopter crew chief.

He served in a variety of locations over the year, always as a crew chief, including 12 months in Afghanistan and 15 months in Iraq, where he was part of the U.S. presidential military surge. But after eight years, he came to realize that he was not destined to be a career soldier.

"I didn't feel there was anything left for me to do in the Army", Glasstetter said. "I knew I wasn't going to make it a career."

While he was in the Army, he had started taking classes online through UM-Flint. "I knocked out 24 credits while in Iraq." He started taking classes on campus at UM-Flint last fall and is majoring in human resource management and organizational labor.

Glasstetter said he hopes to use his degree to further advocate for student veterans.

After fighting for his country on foreign soil, Glasstetter said, he realized there was work to do back in the USA.

"I made a choice to come back home and better my own community. My own hometown. So here we are."

Carl Stoddard
Maj. MIARNG (Ret.)

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