Tales From The Front:

Editor’s note: This is the first in a six-part series about war veterans who are members of the Veterans Student Union at UCI.

You’ve heard Ben Mayer’s story before.

He was a kid growing up in a big city suburb with a family that didn’t have enough money to send him to school. An 8-year-old Mayer saw his big brother become a Marine. He said he would never join the military, but as the college years approached, his options were limited.

“I never intended a military career,” Mayer said.

To his mother’s chagrin, a 17-year-old Mayer bartered a deal to get the education package he wanted in exchange for joining the Army Reserves.

It’s not a deal he regrets, but he doesn’t feel he was given what he was promised.

The promises?

Mayer said he was told there was “not a chance” he would be deployed to a combat zone, yet he ended up serving in Iraq from October 2005 to October 2006.

He said he was told he would receive in-state tuition for schooling, no matter where he decided to attend. At both UCI and Saddleback College, that turned out not to be the case, he said.

Mayer, 24 and a slouching 6-feet-tall with a narrow face, can be found most days wearing a baseball cap — most often supporting his hometown Seattle Seahawks football team.

He is set to graduate from UCI this quarter and plans to study abroad before going to law school. He and some of the other student veterans at the university have started a Veterans Student Union on the campus — a group that gives student veterans the chance to find camaraderie among those who share their experiences.

Mayer, a sergeant, was deployed to Balad, Iraq, with the Army’s 10th Mountain unit in October 2005. His specialty was electronics, but he recalls doing only two months of electronics work there.

Mayer coped amid the mortar fire in Iraq by focusing on his tasks but the experience “hit me like a ton of bricks” and “no one knows how to prepare for uncertainty.”

But it wasn’t all bad.

“Wow,” he recalls thinking. “I’m in the cradle of civilization.”

Then a different reality would take over.

“I thought about dying,” he said. “It’s scary. You learn death is everywhere.”

You learn plenty of things.

Mayer likes the idea of diplomacy. His instincts are against war, and he struggled with the idea of fighting people he knew nothing about.