Bill proposes tuition loan help for student-soldiers serving in Iraq

National Guard medic Patrick Campbell was a year into law school at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., when he volunteered for a deployment to Iraq. Upon his return, the California native found his student loans in default."I was getting two letters a day from them and phone calls every morning from people telling me I was being put in collections agencies because you haven't been paying back your loans," he said.Students aren't usually required to repay their loans until after graduation. But because of his deployment, Campbell had been out of school for over a year, triggering the repayment obligation.During his first semester back at law school, Campbell said he exchanged over 40 letters with his lender, Access Group of Delaware. Eventually, he was able to shift $40,000 in federally subsidized student loans out of arrears, but an additional $15,000 in unsubsidized loans remain in collection.His credit was ruined.But that didn't stop Campbell. The former student body president at UC Berkeley had worked for Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and East Bay Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, so Campbell knew something about lawmaking. When his lender told him the only way to restore his pre-deployment status was to "rewrite the constitutions," he decided to do just that. He spent his last year of law school finding legislative solutions for returning student-soldiers.The result was the Veterans Education Tuition Support Act, which Campbell wrote and shopped around Washington.