Nick Livingston knows the lifestyle of a student is far removed from the way he spent the past eight years before coming to Lipscomb.
“I was in places like Iraq when I was your age,” Livingston said.”We were hungry, we ran out of food, bullets; you didn’t know if you would have anything to eat or drink the next day.”
Livingston, who is at Lipscomb as a part of the Yellow Ribbon program to attract veterans, spent much of his youth at war.
The program brought Livingston, now a sophomore Bible major, to Lipscomb the first year it was in effect in 2009.
Veterans are able to come to school with G.I. Bill funding, but it’s not enough to cover Lipscomb costs, so the university picks up the remainder of the tuition. This year the Yellow Ribbon program participants nearly doubled in numbers, bringing more than 60 veterans and their families onto our campus.
At 18, Livingston graduated from Cibola High School in Albuquerque, N.M., enlisted and left for basic training on May 30, 2001, months before the events of Sept.11 changed the world.
He made a choice to sacrifice his youth because he believed in something.
“I wanted to create a better world for my nieces and for my family to live in,” Livingston said.
He was trained as an intelligence analyst and counter-terrorism specialist. During his eight year stint, Livingston was deployed on multiple tours, which included being in Korea for a year, Iraq for three years total and Afghanistan for eight months.
“I don’t really think there are parallels (between Lipscomb and the Army), because you are coming from an environment where you are expected to show up to an environment where no one really cares if you show up,” Livingston said.
“It is a lot different because if you don’t do your job in the Army you’re likely to die or get people you care about killed.”
As a non-commissioned officer, he was in charge of soldiers and every aspect of their lives. In the transition from that to college student he was basically going from a highly regulated environment of rules and regulations to that of one which is very laid back and wasn’t responsible for much of anything other than himself.
Perhaps the most historic of his duties involved the invasion of Iraq.
The unit prepped for the invasion by conducting training in the Kuwaiti desert, along the border of the country.
Once his unit was sent into Iraq they began the weeklong drive into Baghdad, driving anywhere from 16-18 hours straight in a day in the middle of the desert staying off the roads. During this drive, the unit was caught in a sandstorm that lasted nearly two days.
“It was like living on Mars,” he said. “It was so weird; all this sand would kick up and even during the day it felt like dusk, but everything was red because of the dust.”
Once in Baghdad, they had day-to-day duties, involving peace-keeping, taking of prisoners and offering ground-support for aircraft.
In setting up the center of operations they took over a bombed-out building the soldiers dubbed “Hotel California.”
The troops lived in an old travel agency with offices and rooms they could occupy. The groups of people such as supply, intelligence and operations would all sleep in separate rooms in the old offices.
Using wire, they established temporary jail cells, where they could keep and interrogate prisoners of war.
That was just one of many Army experiences that he recounts, events that he says made him what he is today.
“Do I wish I was 20 again? Yes. But would I trade all my experiences to go back and make another decision for a life that could have been? No. I am the man I am today because of the experiences I have had and I wouldn’t change that.”