Enyart: Military Service Gave This Veteran Everything
OPINION
Veterans’ Day is the day our nation thanks its veterans for what they have done for our country. This Veterans’ Day, let me, as a veteran, thank our country and the state of Illinois for what they have done for me.
In exchange for my oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States of America, I have received rewards far beyond any I ever expected.
I enjoyed the privilege of wearing the military uniform of this great nation over the course of six decades. The son of a factory worker and dime store clerk, with not one of my grandparents getting past the eighth grade, I enlisted in the United States Air Force as a lowly boot recruit, at 19-years-old in 1969. 43 years later, I retired as a 63-year-old major general.
Back in the 1970’s, as an honorably discharged veteran, the citizens of this great nation presented me with the gift of four years of the GI Bill educational benefits. My great state, the State of Illinois, presented me with four years of free tuition at any state school.
Some people may say those benefits weren’t a gift, they were earned. To me, they were a gift. A gift of a brighter future. A gift, not of an entitlement, but a gift of opportunity. An opportunity of an education without the crushing student debt that so many of our young people bear today.
I owe thanks also to Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and the visionaries who built it. As a returning veteran and first-generation college student, those far-sighted educators realized that I probably didn’t have the tools to succeed at college without some extra tutoring. A simple one credit hour course required of what were called “non-traditional students,” meaning those outside the typical college student age range of eighteen to twenty-two, taught me the simple little things that mean so much to success in college. They were things my working-class parents had no way of imparting to me. Things that I didn’t learn in my three-hundred-seventy student rural high school.
My thanks to the visionaries of the Southern Illinois University system and the State of Illinois don’t end there. Two years after graduating from SIU-E, the then three-year-old law school at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale agreed to accept a veteran with a decidedly checkered academic past. With just enough GI Bill benefits and state tuition benefits to complete the three years required for a law degree, I enrolled.
With the opportunities presented me by a grateful nation, a grateful state, and educators with a vision, I went in ten years from working on the welding line at Caterpillar Tractor Company to neophyte lawyer.
Soon after law school graduation, I re-entered the military becoming a commissioned officer in the Illinois Army National Guard. Thirty years later I stepped down as the commanding general of the 13,000 soldiers, airmen, and civilian employees of the Illinois National Guard, only to be elected a United States congressman to serve and represent the people of Southern Illinois in Washington, D.C.
None of this would have been possible without the gift and the grace shown to me by the taxpayers of our great nation and state who provided me with the opportunity gain an education as well as the foresight of the educators and legislators who built the system to extend that opportunity to a kid with no money, no family connections, and no future.
No need to thank me, my friends. It is I who owes you thanks on this Veterans’ Day and everyday.
Bill Enyart is a former Adjutant General of the Illinois Army and Air National Guard and served in Congress from 2013-2015. He now hosts a podcast called “Reflections from the River” available at www.billenyart.com.