Campuses:
Editor's note: Each fall, the CFANS development team brings together scholarship winners and the people who support those scholarships. At the 2009 Thanksgiving for Scholarships dinner, Chase Crawford, a senior agricultural industries and marketing major, spoke about his experience and how a scholarship helped him. This is a slightly edited transcript from that evening. You can see video of Chase’s speech and the other speeches that night at
www.cfans.umn.edu/CFANSGiving/index.htm. 
My name is Chase Crawford. I’m from a little town in southern Minnesota called Sherburn. I’ve taken a little different route to this point. I always wanted to farm, and my senior year of high school I scraped up some machinery and rounded up 40 acres, and I was off and running. I added a little bit of land every year until I was up to a little over 400 acres. Right out of high school, I joined the Minnesota National Guard. I wanted to be able to do my part in case something bad happened like a flood or tornado. The world was a little more innocent then. And I had no idea just how big a part I’d end up doing.
In the spring of 2005, my unit got the word that we’d be put on active duty for deployment to Iraq the following fall. As you can imagine, this kind of put a damper on my farming operation. I spent that summer selling my 100 head of cattle and making arrangements to put my operation on hold for what I thought was going to be just a little over a year. It was a wet fall that year, and when it came time to leave on October 12, I hadn’t quite got everything done. I had to walk away with 150 acres of corn in the field. But I’m lucky to live where I do and I’m lucky to have the neighbors that I did. They had seven combines in that 150-acre field at one time. Took them about an hour and a half to get it done.
In Iraq I was a sergeant, a team leader in charge of four others. We were stationed south of Baghdad, and my team and I did just about everything there was to do on the ground at one time or another, including getting hit by a roadside bomb while on patrol one night. My injuries were relatively minor compared to the others in my vehicle. I suppose if luck had anything to do with it, I consider myself pretty lucky.
What was supposed to be a deployment of a year turned into 16 months in Iraq. We finally returned home in August 2007, after 22 months away. Having to go to war is hard. And I always expected that it would be. What caught me off -guard was that the hardest part of the ordeal wasn’t leaving home or having to deal with horrible things that happen in a war. The hardest part has been coming home and trying to fit back into the life that I remembered. I spent the first year letting the pieces fall as they would, figuring out what I wanted to do with the seemingly new life that I had come into. And I decided the best option would be going back to school to finish my education before I got back to the rigors of farming.
I chose to come to the U of M. I got the ball rolling, but there were still a few more details. I’d been on my own for a while, accumulating the things that adults do like a mortgage and other bills. The G.I. Bill is a great program, and it helps a lot, but there are still a few loose ends left over. This is why having scholarship opportunities is so important.
I’m very fortunate that I’ve been able to continue my education. And I’m not saying that because I’ve had the opportunity to finish school that I’m going to go out and change the world, but there are people in my same situation that will. They’ll be able to do that because of the scholarship money that the donors in this room donate. And I thank you for that.
As for me, who knows? I’ll be done with my degree here in the spring and I already have 200 acres rounded up for next year. I suppose I’ll try and pick up in the same course I started out on several years ago. But, I thought I had it all figured out once before and experience as taught me that life can be very unpredictable. And truthfully it’d be pretty boring if it wasn’t. So thank you again.
