{"id":10500,"date":"2015-04-30T07:58:17","date_gmt":"2015-04-30T12:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=10500"},"modified":"2024-07-02T16:07:23","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:07:23","slug":"combat-veteran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=10500","title":{"rendered":"Combat veteran completes special mission"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Feeling<\/a>
Feeling isolated as a 27-year-old veteran, Jacob Hinton helped grow the Carolina Veterans Organization as president.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When he was only 19, Jacob Hinton deployed with the 82nd Airborne Division to the mountains of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Hinton, on his first of two combat tours in that country, served as a forward observer with the infantry. He protected his fellow soldiers by calling in air strikes and mortar support against the enemy whenever they were in a position to pose a threat.<\/p>\n

In this deadly business, Hinton said, he clearly knew the rules of engagement.<\/p>\n

But the terrain he encountered when he set foot on the Chapel Hill campus in fall of 2013 proved to be treacherous in ways his eyes could not tell him.<\/p>\n

The day-to-day danger he faced here as a 27-year-old combat veteran, he said, was the overwhelming sense of being alone.<\/p>\n

How he got here \u2013 and managed to get in \u2013 was an odyssey as odd and inexplicable as going off to war, Hinton said.<\/p>\n

He grew up in Grants, New Mexico, in a county with one high school and fewer than 10,000 people. The only thing he knew about Carolina back then was that the great Michael Jordan played his college ball there, Hinton said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, in December 2010, a month after he left the Army, Hinton drove from Fayetteville to Chapel Hill to apply. He told people in admissions about his GED and they looked at his test scores.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey told me I wasn\u2019t competitive,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hinton said he tried to shrug it off, but he was too proud to take their word for it that he was not good enough, and too stubborn to take no for an answer.<\/p>\n

He enrolled at Wake Technical Community College, then took time off in 2012 for the birth of his son before giving Carolina a second try. This time, he filled out a formal application and wrote an essay in which he detailed how he believed his military service had prepared him to become involved in international affairs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not long after that, his acceptance letter arrived.<\/p>\n

A rocky start<\/span><\/h3>\n

At first, he walked around campus with a tremendous sense of pride, but that feeling quickly faded as the semester went on and he found himself feeling more and more isolated.<\/p>\n

When fighting a war, at least there was the cold comfort of knowing his buddies had his back. At Carolina, he felt none of the other students knew \u2013 or cared \u2013 that he was even there. <\/span><\/p>\n

The fact that he had been in the military had nothing to do with that, Hinton added. Other undergraduates knew he was older than they were, and the gap in age divided them like a wall.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was 27 years old and I didn\u2019t know anybody. I had no peers, nobody to hang out with,\u201d Hinton said.<\/p>\n

At least not until that November when he heard about a newly formed veterans\u2019 group called the Carolina Veterans Organization (CVO). \u201cI reached out and said, \u2018Hey, I\u2019m feeling like I\u2019ve got to meet somebody.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He discovered there weren\u2019t all that many people to meet \u2013 just the three organizers and four veterans who joined.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe three organizers told me they were all graduating and they didn\u2019t have anyone to take over,\u201d Hinton said.<\/p>\n

At that moment, Hinton knew he had found a new mission. College, he had come to see, was another fight for survival unlike any he had encountered before. Maybe, he thought, the Carolina Veterans Organization could be a way for them to look out for one another.<\/p>\n