Tom Gingerella has this pithy way of summing up the position of him and other military veterans who head for college after their wars.

“We’re the dogs on the floor waiting for a fry to drop.”

It shouldn’t be that way, of course. Veterans returning to campus should, at the very least, be on equal footing with those who have stayed civilians.

Gingerella is a disabled veteran of the war in Iraq. He served with the Rhode Island National Guard and saw action in the first siege of Fallujah. When he came home, he started classes at Rhode Island College under a program called Vocational Rehabilitation For Disabled Veterans through the Department of Veterans Affairs. It covers all his expenses. It also means that, on registering freshman year, he had to wait until the day before the semester began to choose his courses. And by that time, many of the courses he wanted were filled.

It is an issue Gingerella, who is in charge of security here at The Journal, would like to bring up with the student veterans organization at RIC.

“Maybe as a group, we’d be able to bring issues to someone who could make a difference.”

The problem is, there is no campus veterans organization. Gingerella is trying to start one. So is John Powers, a student at RIC who has become a strong and seemingly tireless advocate for veterans in Rhode Island.

Powers spent months putting together a veterans resource guide, an invaluable piece of work that tells veterans what services are available and where they can be found. He did it in response to the ongoing problems a friend has had since returning from Iraq. And earlier this month, he went to Chicago on his own dime to attend the first national conference of Student Veterans of America, an organization formed in response to the lack of services for veterans returning to campuses across the country.

“There are 316,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan under 24,” says Powers. “That’s my generation. And I’ve seen what happens when they don’t get the resources they need.”

What Powers learned in Chicago is that some states do much better by their college-bound vets than others. Rhode Island is not a leader. In Minnesota, for example, there are on-campus veterans resource centers to deal with all kinds of issues, from the G.I. Bill to withdrawals from classes due to deployment. There is a higher education support call center.

So Powers and Gingerella and some veterans on other Rhode Island campuses want to start organizations that can connect veterans to the things they need to make a tough transition. One problem at RIC, says Powers, is that veterans tend to come to class and go home. They don’t connect with the college except in the classroom. So there is a selling job to do, convincing them that their college lives will be better if they organize.

But everybody has to work at this — the veterans, the colleges and universities, the state. More and more veterans will be coming home and going after college educations they might not have considered before. They will bring a whole bunch of stuff with them.

There should be a place on campus for veterans to go for answers and to tap into the support of other veterans. There should be people to talk to, at least a number to call, when past experience gets all mixed up with what’s happening now.

And there should be no way that veterans on campus should have to wait for everybody else to make their picks before they get to choose their courses. That’s nuts.

bkerr@projo.com