The demons don't visit nearly as often as they did when Bart Gutke was sent home from the Iraq in 2006, a 21-year-old with a traumatic brain injury. He was discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps a year later.
To look at Gutke now is to see a 23-year-old with close shaved blond hair and intense blue eyes, just another kid schlepping his backpack across the University of Idaho campus.
But beneath the uniform of a typical college student is a soldier on prescribed medications who battles depression, insomnia, anxiety, chronic headaches, mild hearing and memory loss and post-traumatic stress disorder.
"You wouldn't look at me and think `wounded soldier,"' Gutke said.
This status, no matter how hidden, gives him access to a program at the University of Idaho that helps severely and permanently wounded Iraq veterans enroll and graduate without debt. The Operation Education program was created at Idaho in 2006 and replicated this fall at Adrian College in Michigan.
Karen White, wife of former UI president Tim White, spearheaded the program for wounded veterans and helped pull together $400,000 to pay for it. "We kind of expected the students to be typical amputees," White said.
Instead of soldiers with missing limbs, the program has opened doors for servicemen suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, soldiers like Gutke, who is one of three students who are enrolled on the Moscow campus through Operation Education.
Gutke grew up in a small farming community in southeastern Idaho and left four months after he graduated from high school, an 18-year-old determined to fight terrorism in the Marines.
He also sacrificed in a way he never expected.
Two years ago, he was traveling through darkness in a military vehicle in western Iraq at 50 mph when the driver attempted to cross a bridge he thought was still standing.
They military vehicle fell 30 feet. There were broken bones, basic cuts and bruises, an Iraqi translator's ear was ripped off his face. Gutke was knocked unconscious.
"I never in a million years thought that was the way I would get hurt," said Gutke, who was treated at a hospital in Germany before the military sent him back to the United States.
A recent RAND Corp. study found nearly 20 percent of returning troops from Iraq and Afghanistan -- about 300,000 -- have PTSD or suffer from major depression. Of those, only 53 percent have sought treatment.
Gutke really doesn't have a choice, treatment is directly tied to how well he performs in the program paying his way through college.
"When I don't take my medication, when I don't go to counseling, it really shows," he said. "I have no motivation, I really don't care about homework."
While he prefers the obscurity granted to him here, on a campus where he is one of about 10,670 students, in a lot of ways it is also a troubling place for someone who fights the mental battles Gutke wages every day.
He hates crowds and sits in the back of classrooms to be near the door. He still has nightmares, dreams riddled with death and circumstances he can't control -- car accidents and plane crashes. He said he used to drink heavily to cope with the pain and frustration. He meets with a psychologist at the closest Veteran's Administration hospital, which is 80 miles north of Moscow in Spokane, Wash.
"If they know anything, they know they're not like everyone else," said John Sawyer, the university's veteran adviser.
The university created Operation Education in 2006 to make up for the financial shortfalls veterans face after they've exhausted state and federal financial aid and benefits under the GI Bill. The current GI benefit is $1,101 per month for up to 36 months for qualifying active-duty personnel and $317 per month for reservists.
"There's no way that a student who has only the GI bill can go to school and live on it," Sawyer said.
Operation Education was replicated in Michigan this year at Adrian College, a private Methodist school. Three wounded veterans have enrolled through the program, said Rick Creehan, Adrian's vice president.
The college contacted the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to see if other schools, besides the University of Idaho, have adopted comprehensive programs to financially assist wounded veterans and ensure they don't have to work while earning their degrees and graduate without debt.
"They were not aware of anything like this," Creehan said.
Gutke hopes the program will bring awareness to the private battles soldiers face at home. He could have been among the soldiers who went untreated, he could have canceled school as an option while struggling to help his 22-year-old wife, Jonette, raise their son, Jack, who turned one in August.
"I was just really lucky," he said.
Click on the links below for more information on Operation Education.