Bring Rifles and Books: College on a U.S. Base in Baghdad

Service members, many of whom had been taking online courses while deployed, were delighted to learn they could attend classes with live professors, said Staff Sgt. Jimmy Labas, 28. The Army pays tuition for its deployed soldiers. "It's a great opportunity," he said. "It helps their morale, and it helps them get ahead."

At 48, Williams is just a few credits away from becoming a college graduate, the first in her family. "I never in my life thought I'd say I have a degree," she said during a break from class. "Now I'm this close."

Scheduling is hard. Most service members work 12-hour days and six- or seven-day weeks. Classes are often held in the evenings, after dinner, or on a weekend day, and soldiers typically take one course at a time.

Brooks said she sometimes arranges to meet with students outside class, to make up for lessons they missed while on a mission. She said she finds the students to be extremely motivated, grateful for the opportunity despite their exhaustion.

And they never offer the standard "dog ate my homework" line. Instead, she said, it's "I'm late because the Humvee flipped over and I was getting shot at."

While the instructors stay on base, protected by elaborate security, they know the students are going "outside the wire" all the time, into much more dangerous areas. When she taught in Afghanistan, Brooks said, the base next to the Pakistani border was hit by rockets several times, and as a volunteer at the hospital there, she saw soldiers coming in on stretchers.

"It makes it pretty real," she said. "I'm always so glad when their smiling faces come through the door, even if they don't have their homework done."

Kinzie reported from Washington.