Smoothing the Transition

Hernán Luis y Prado is being recognized as a Champion of Change for his dedication to service and his continued support for efforts to boost employment for fellow veterans.

Transitioning from military service to civilian life can be challenging in the best of times. For the estimated two million veterans who served a tour -- or multiple tours -- of duty in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are even more hurdles than usual. Chief among them is the economy, which has helped drive the jobless rate amongst those veterans to more than 12 percent in 2011-- well above the rate of the general population. It's even worse for veterans between 18 and 34 years old; their jobless rate neared 30 percent in 2011. Other factors that come into play include medical advances that are resulting in greater survivability on the battlefield -- and more “Wounded Warriors” (severely injured service members) returning home.

I made a commitment to myself on the night I ran into a young marine, John, who had served with me in Iraq. He had nothing when he came back. He had a young bride-to-be and was waiting at a Navy medical center to transition home. Every week they would tell him he was going home the following week . . . this went on for months and months. It was incredibly painful and stressful on him. For people like John, it can be awful to go from knowing where the danger is to having complete uncertainty over your future, not knowing if the service is going to keep you or not, not knowing what you are transitioning to, and knowing you are unprepared. It was a tremendous ordeal for John and he handled it well -- but many of our other friends in similar situations committed suicide. I knew there had to be a better way. At first, I opened my house, garage and back yard to friends so they could come over during their medical rehabilitations and work with my metal fabrication and woodworking tools.

Helping Survive the Peace

Bob Curry is being recognized as a Champion of Change for his dedication to service and his continued support for efforts to: end homelessness, boost employment and treat mental health disparities for fellow veterans.

In 2003, while I sat with other Vietnam veterans in the waiting room at the VA for a PTSD group to begin, we found ourselves fixated on the televisions in the room. The screens, filled with images of a younger generation at war in Afghanistan and building up for an invasion of Iraq, made us re-experience the same tension of going into battle that this newest generation of warriors a half a world away were facing. We agreed this newest generation of warriors deserved better then we received, and we needed to do something about it.We had become a generation who lost over fifty thousand to combat, three times that number to suicide after the war’s end, and over ½ million veterans who became incarcerated years after our war. There are thousands of broken families, relationships, and addictions that become reality for the service men and women who returned. You’ll begin to see the true human cost of war that families and their communities, our communities, will forever bear. I knew these younger brothers and sisters fighting our newest wars who made it home would face a similar path, a path strewn with unseen, unanticipated, and unexplored challenges that would take more lives than the wars themselves unless action was taken.