Soldiering On

By Bo Petersen
Photography by Justin Morris ’08

Connor Knight jaunts across the Cistern Yard in beach sandals, red beard and bandanna, looking too laid back to be your average sophomore.
He isn’t.
Nine years ago as part of a training excersise, Knight was under simulated attack on a mountaintop in the Balkans, part of a NATO force-protection and peacekeeping unit charged with securing the site for a communications outpost. The operation was one of a number the group conducted in the region, once ripped apart by sectarian conflicts.
A squad was down. Knight was an Army Airborne infantry private first class, an expert rifleman carrying an M4 carbine, a medical pack and an evac litter – a soft stretcher to carry casualties.
They got to the squad, got them medevaced and took on the gear they carried. For Knight that meant a machine gun, 400 rounds for it, a rocket launcher and the GPS tracker for it, as well as his own rifle and gear. All in all, his load weighed 350 pounds.
Now they had to fight back.

Knight is 30 years old. He talks with traces of a coastal Alabama dialect cut with the clipped cadences of a soldier. He has a self-deprecating laugh and an assured self-confidence. He’s studying archaeology and religion. The beach bum vibe is for real. On weekends he’s a surfing instructor for the Folly Beach–based Warrior Surf Foundation. He joined the foundation after hearing about it from some of “his” group – fellow veterans on the College of Charleston campus.
In 2018 he picked out the College from a brochure handed to him in Vicenza, Italy, as he transitioned out of the service. He was going down a list of the top 50 veteran-friendly schools. The College ranked No. 7. The idea of a beach town in the South appealed to a guy who grew up sailing in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I think I was supposed to land here, if that makes any sense,” says Knight.
The College has helped him readjust. The ocean, he says, heals. Asked about his military experience, he swallows hard and stares at nothing for a moment. He doesn’t want the story to dwell on that; he wants it to focus on what he’s found at the school, the foundation. He has veteran friends who took their own lives because they couldn’t cope with what they’d been through.
“At the time it (surfing) was the only thing that brought me joy. I treated it like a mission.”

Taking part in joint military exercises in Poland.
When Knight first stepped under the live oaks and Spanish moss of the Cistern Yard, he was more than a little lost. He’d spent the bulk of six years essentially on alert. Every step he took was part reconnaissance, his eyes scanning, reflexively tensed to respond to threat. That doesn’t just end, even at a place so serene as the College of Charleston campus.
“Every classroom, every hallway I walk down” he was still vigilant, he says. “Once you come back from an environment like, the rest of this stuff was distant, overwhelming.”
Before he got to the College, he was frazzled, abusing drugs and alcohol, living what he calls now “a toxic and unhealthy lifestyle.” A rage seethed inside him, he says – intense anger that he didn’t understand. Anything could trigger it.
“I was so full of hate,” he says. “It didn’t matter where I found myself. I didn’t know where it came from.”
For Knight, as for most veterans, transitioning back to everyday life was the hardest thing he’d ever done.
“You see all these young people who don’t have to worry about the things I had to worry about, and about the things my mind will – there are things it’s hard to let go of, certain awarenesses, certain things.”
With 228 veteran and military students this past semester, the College makes a point of providing paths for veterans struggling to transition – programs such as Veteran and Military Student Services, the Student Veterans Association, peer advisors and the Green Zone, which is a network to prepare faculty and staff to work with the student veterans and identify resources for them.
Along with those programs are veteran support in a region that has a military presence of all branches of service and a population of some 35,000 veterans in Charleston County alone – plus the quality of life in the Lowcountry that draws people from all over.
When Knight turned up in Lenny Lowe’s Survey of World Religions course, he had an anxious type of seriousness, Lowe says. He was asking profound, cultured questions from real-world experience and significance – big questions about meaning and values that you don’t expect to hear from students in an introductory course.
“He was a little frustrated, he told me,” says Lowe, assistant professor of religious studies. “He didn’t feel people were asking the right questions, the important questions.”
There’s an Army photo of Knight in the National Archives, snapped while he took part in joint military exercises in Poland after the Balkans. He’s not the friendly-eyed student who greets you in the Cistern Yard. His face is painted camouflage, his eyes steely and cold.
“Kill, kill, kill,” he says, only half-kidding when asked what he was thinking then. He pauses. “No. All right, let me rewind that.” He sits back, looks away and then talks about what the College and foundation have done for him.
The Warrior Surf Foundation is a strand in a web of groups in the Charleston area that make up a sort of co-op to provide support for veterans. It provides therapy sessions and meditative exercises such as yoga, but its key component is in the waves. More than 500 veterans have taken surfing lessons through the foundation, a dozen or more each weekend. As many as 40 or 50 will show up on good-weather weekends.
They find something in the surf that sheds the traumas, the troubles. It settles them.
“We have a saying,” Knight says: “Leave it on the beach.”
He had never surfed before he got together with the vets in the foundation. He took to it like he had fins. “At the time it was the only thing that brought me joy,” he says. “I treated it like a mission.” A few weeks in the breakers and he was instructing.
When he’s out there now working with another veteran, he looks like he’s at home. “Oh, man,” he says about the feeling he gets from it. “It’s a good place to be.”

After he got out, trying to get his head back together while surfing with fellow veterans in Guatemala, he spotted smoke on the shore, and the training kicked in.
The Warrior Surf Foundation Group and the others came ashore sprinting and quickly put together a bucket brigade to douse the fire before the flames engulfed the entire village. They were settling in for the night afterward when they heard a crash. After a night of drinking at a nearby bar, a man sped off in his car, smashing into a tuktuk – a motorized rickshaw. The tuktuk driver was thrown to the ground with both legs snapped and his thigh gashed open bleeding.
People were screaming and crying. Knight raced to help, barefoot and in shorts. He packed the wound, tightened a tourniquet and, with another surfer, pulled an exposed leg bone back in, devising a splint with palm fronds and pieces of metal.
It just kicked in.

This is Knight’s second stint at the College, broken up by the COVID-19 years. He’s come a long way to find the peace he has. He is calmer now, and has more clarity, says Lowe. In a world that’s complicated and messy, his demeanor is: Here’s the problem; here are the ways I want to fix it.
“It’s become clear to me he has done some really hard work figuring out the person he wants to be in the world and what he wants the degree for,” adds Lowe. “His seriousness is precise now rather than frantic.”
The College, Knight says, “has helped me lock in on the kind of subjects that interest me, allowed me to explore things I might otherwise never have” – such as a religious studies minor to augment his majors in archaeology and anthropology. Grappling with lingering, unsolved mysteries fascinates him. Before, he was closed off from divinity, his own spirituality, he says.
“I have allowed myself to grow into the kind of person I would have liked to have been then and who I am proud to be now.”

“The College has helped me lock in on the kind of subjects that interest me, allowed me to explore things I might otherwise never have.”



Top, giving surf lessons to another veteran at Folly Beach, S.C. Above, heading to the waves, catching one and reading in the Cistern Yard.
That guy on campus with the sandals, bandanna and beach bum vibe is a service veteran who still serves, the son of a Green Beret, from a family with a military tradition. He’s proud of that, though not always so proud of the world that demanded it.
The Army taught him a lot about the world: “It opened my eyes to the kind of person I didn’t want to be and dialed in the kind of person I did want to be.”
His mornings start with exercise. He wears a wrist bracelet of tiny skulls his mom makes for family members who serve. It’s a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death.
The community he found on campus and the sessions in the surf let vets talk about their problems and figure out ways to solve them.
“We equip ourselves with tools and philosophies that allow us to navigate reality a little more peacefully,” says Knight, who pulls from those philosophies to make sense of a world where people can be compassionate one moment and violent the next. “You can’t be human now and not have war in your blood.”
He’s still a warrior. That jaunt through the Cistern Yard was part recon, he acknowledged, to get a read on the person he was meeting and an unrelated student demonstration taking place nearby. As he sits to talk, dust blows in from construction across the street. He jumps to his feet to take stock of it.
The conditioning “may never go away. And that’s OK,” he says. “It’s the integration with one’s self. They’re like a shadow. You have got to learn to love the shadows. You’ve got to be ready in case it happens. The likelihood of it happening, sure, may be slim. But in my opinion, it’s better to be the guy on the ground responding than the one standing by not knowing what to do.”
He likes to come sit on a bench in the Cistern Yard between classes, quietly taking it all in. “This is my place where I go to decompress, take my shoes off. Get some dirt in my toes.”