By Rachel Shafer

After serving with U.S. armed forces overseas, James Taheny (left) and Michael Gardner are now full-time students at Berkeley Engineering.
PHOTO BY RACHEL SHAFER

Before he was a junior in civil and environmental engineering (CEE), Michael Gardner had one of the world’s most dangerous jobs—hunting for IEDs, improvised explosive devices, in the streets north of Baghdad.

In 2003–04, Gardner served as a combat engineer with the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division in Iraq. As he explains it, a combat engineer doesn’t engineer. He looks for weapons caches buried in the ground. He sweeps for mines. He patrols a neighborhood with other soldiers, cordons off an area and searches for suspects or explosives. He mourns the deaths of guys in his squad.

James Taheny, as a student at Marin County’s Tamalpais High School, dismissed an engineering career. “I had a difficult time with math,” he says. “I thought, ‘If I can’t do math, I can’t be an engineer.’”

He enlisted in the Army in 2001 and was sent to the Horn of Africa in 2003, on a mission to stem the flow of suspected terrorists from the Middle East. As an infantry soldier, he helped train Ethiopian troops, honed tactics for rescuing pilots from downed planes and helped build wells and schools for local villages.

Taheny rose to the rank of sergeant, then left the military four years later. “I thought, ‘I don’t care how hard the math is; I’m going into engineering by sheer force of will.’” He overcame a difficult reentry into civilian life, personal doubts and two years of community college to get here, and is now a CEE junior.

Two of more than 150 military veterans at UC Berkeley, Gardner, 25, and Taheny, 28, are building new lives. Today, when faced with a vexing homework problem or a midterm, they keep things in perspective. “It’s better than sitting on guard duty for eight hours,” Gardner says. “Or getting shot at,” Taheny adds.

Both men harbor guilt over pursuing a college education. They say it feels indulgent after having dedicated themselves to defending the nation’s security and experiencing the life-and-death reality of active service. They must also contend with financial aid until the new GI Bill, which will fully fund their studies, kicks in this August. But they see it as a means to an end; with a Berkeley Engineering degree, they can help others less fortunate, perhaps in Africa or other developing nations.

“If you’re lucky enough to come back from deployment, you have a responsibility to give back,” Gardner says. “The guy who’s dead . . . he doesn’t have that opportunity. It’s almost morally wrong not to try to make the most of yourself.”