Jim Kosbiel@@directory@@ joined the military, had two kids, went to war, got accepted to the University of Oregon and would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
Kosbiel, a sophomore, joined the military because he wanted to get an education but couldn’t afford it.
“My dad was in the military for 22 years, my grandpa for 25 years,” Kosbiel said. “I grew up with the military and I knew that was how I was going to get what I wanted.”
He decided to come to Oregon to study education based on two factors: how good the school was and how far away from home it was.
“I love kids, and I love watching when that lights turns on and they say, ‘I get it!’” Kosbiel said.
Kosbiel’s hardest class this term is physics but not for the reasons you would normally expect. Kosbiel isn’t struggling because his 100-level class is too hard; Kosbiel is struggling because he’s used to advanced physics.
“I blew stuff up. I worked with missile systems so we had to deal with a bunch of different variables that aren’t being considered in this class,” Kosbiel said.
It took Kosbiel a while to adjust to coming back from Iraq; his routine is completely different.
“You go from being told what to do and how to do it to being able to set your own schedule. It’s going from one extreme to the other,” Kosbiel said. “It’s great.”
However, there are things that aren’t “great.”
“When I came back I had trouble with driving, sleeping, loud noises, my alarm clock, people touching me when I was asleep,” Kosbiel said. “I still have nightmares.”
But Kosbiel feels that war is always put in a bad light by the media.
“People don’t understand everything we saw back there. We saw people who lived there who, as bad as they had it, they knew they had it better now,” Kosbiel said. “The media shows all of the bad stuff. They distort it.”
Despite all of the bad things that did happen to Kosbiel, there were always positives.
“In the Navy you can’t just be in the middle of the ocean without needing to fuel up so we got to stop in foreign countries for four days. Three of those days they let you play, so it was really only one day of work,” Kosbiel said. “I’ve been to more places than most of the people on this campus, including faculty.”