Meet your 21st century soldiers

The finger that flips through the textbook used to rest on a trigger.  The hand that rises in class to ask a question once saluted an officer.

The feet that walk through Dunn Meadow used to patrol door to door in Iraq. Hundreds of student veterans walk among us on this campus. They sit next to you in Spanish, behind you in W131 or in front of you in finite. We remember the troops. 

We remember the war. But we’ve forgotten the soldier. The nation never welcomed these men and women home. There isn’t a victory to celebrate. There still isn’t an end in sight.

These soldiers come and go through the classrooms in Bloomington, just small drops in the ocean of students. You wouldn’t look twice if you passed one on the street. You probably already have.

These are 21st century soldiers.

MEET KAYLA NIER

Meeting Toby Keith, Jessica Simpson, Carlos Mencia and Gen. David Petraeus would have been a highlight for many of the soldiers serving in Iraq. But for Kayla Nier, it was trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi children.

As she distributed backpacks of supplies to kids at school, one boy told her that “Americans aren’t bad.” She realized then that the adults are set in their ways, but the kids can change.

“Here’s this kid, probably about 10 years old, thinking that everything he has been taught to believe and sees that these troops that are walking around with these big guns and stuff, they must be bad people. And as I handed him this backpack: ‘You aren’t bad; you guys aren’t bad.’ And this is exactly what it’s for: that one kid. If no one else changed, then it was worth it for that one kid.”

Nier started a nonprofit called Winning Hearts and Minds to help collect supplies for the children in Iraq and then helped distribute them during her deployment. Last year, the nonprofit sent more than 500 boxes to a school, and each child received a backpack full of supplies for their families.

“I knew when I came home that I would have to go back to my normal life that I did before I was deployed. But it was different this time because now. I had seen what most people never see, and it was like a new beginning. I came home, and it was like a brand new life now because I was looking at everything in a different way.”

When Nier deployed, her vision of Iraq was long, flat land and dust and sand. But when she got there, she saw what she considers to be progress in the war.

“It’s also a win for Iraq. They have electricity there. They have jobs. We built water towers, schools, hospitals, houses. They didn’t have that before, and they have it all now. They have all this there, and that’s because of the military.”

Nier said even though there are humanitarian benefits for the people, she still considers Iraq to be a lose-lose situation.

“You pull out now and everything that we’ve done in the last nine years is going to crumble and be forgotten about. But you leave us in there for the next 20 years and soldiers are still going to be shot. ... and you pull them out in 20 years and people are still going to go back to their old ways.”

She said she thinks it will be up to the Iraqi children to decide the fate of their country — it’s the only way to win the war.

“We just do our job. I wouldn’t call us heroes, and I wouldn’t say that we’re not heroes. Just that we did our mission, and we do what we were supposed to do — we came back.”

Click to see more profiles of 21st century soldiers.