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MPR News Staff

From the military to the classroom

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As a teenager, Ryan Blum dropped out of high school to join the U.S. Army. He was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served as a squad leader with the Army's 10th Mountain Division.

Now, he's a student at the American University in Paris. He joined MPR News' Kerri Miller to talk about his transition from the military back into civilian life. His op-ed, "The Hard Path from Afghanistan to the Classroom," was recently published in The New York Times.

"I'd seen death," he said. "I just had nothing in common with my fellow students — or so I thought in the beginning."