Talking to family and friends about deployment, combat and post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the hardest things a veteran can do. The Tennessee State Council of Vietnam Veterans knows very well just how difficult it can be. That's why on Tuesday, Jan. 12 they held a "Victory Over PTSD" town hall meeting at the James H. Quillen VA Medical Center.
According to WCYB, a local news station, dozens of veterans and their families attended the meeting. Everything from PTSD indicators, coping methods, treatment providers and the high suicide rate among veterans was discussed openly and thoughtfully. There was a tone of encouragement and support among everyone present.
"We want you to live, we want you to succeed – we want you to have victory!" said Barry Rice, a Vietnam veteran and organizer of the town hall.
After his rotation to Vietnam was up, Rice returned to the states and served as a notification officer. Charged with the responsibility of informing spouses and parents that their husbands and sons had been killed took a significant toll on Rice, leading to a deep sense of survivor's guilt. Talking with fellow veterans about it helped Rice make it through.
Discussing the threat of PTSD – and ways of treating it – are arguably more important now than ever before.
"More American servicemembers, both veterans and active-duty, have committed suicide over the past decade – tragically it's 22-plus per day – than who made the supreme sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan combined," Rice said in a statement to The Greeneville Sun.
"Years ago, when called to duty, young men and women from across Tennessee answered. Now, as Vietnam veterans, we are answering the call for our brother and sister veterans, active-duty military and their families, to share our experiences with and recovery from PTSD, our strength and hope in their time of need," Rice continued.
Going to college isn't the same for veterans as it is for graduating high school students, who are often more worried about missing the next great frat party than actual responsibilities like working a full-time job or taking care of young children. That's why colleges tailored to helping veterans achieve academically are so vital to a life after service.
The Military Times put together a list of the best schools in the country for veterans. Their methodology included taking into account factors like whether veterans were charged at or below Post-9/11 limits, participation in the Yellow Ribbon program – under which the school and the VA partner to cover the difference between tuition and the GI Bill payment cap – extracurricular activities and national accreditation.
Here are their top five picks in each category:
Four-year schools
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Ranked as the best four-year institution in the nation for the second-consecutive year, this public university retains 72 percent of all veterans who attend. With top marks in nearly every category, and 94 percent of its students employed within six years of graduation, University of Nebraska at Omaha leads the field for a good reason.
University of South Florida
Close behind in second place, South Florida's public university also received top marks across nearly all categories.
Eastern Kentucky University
This university's commitment to veterans is evident from just a visit to their website, which provides extensive resources and guidance to students making the transition from military life.
D'Youville College
Located in Buffalo, New York, D'Youville is a private school of only a few thousand students – meaning veterans in attendance receive special attention.
Rutgers
In fifth place is Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, which has long had a commitment to serving its veteran students.
Two-year schools
Central Community College – Nebraska
Evidently Nebraska does a great job of taking care of and educating its veterans. Ranked as the best community college in the country for veterans three years running, the school provides a staff of fellow veterans for academic tutoring and advising, mentoring and counseling, as well as social events around campus.
Georgia Perimeter College
Big as far as two-year institutions go, Perimeter College's 21,000 students have a small, tight-knit veteran community that receives plentiful support from the administration.
Inver Hills Community College
This small public college's veteran resource center provides educational veteran benefits, assistance with VA forms, a comfortable Veterans Lounge and much more.
Clackamas Community College
The only Oregon college to make the top of the list, Clackamas is open to every veteran seeking a certificate program, technical degree or two-year degree.
Northwestern Michigan College
Rounding out the top five two-year schools is another small public college that prides itself on providing a smooth transition into student life for returning veterans.
Online & non-traditional schools
ECPI University
Nationally ranked for five consecutive years now, ECPI has earned its place at the top of the Best for Vets list, as well as Top Military Friendly Colleges and Virginia Values Veterans. With plenty of special accommodations for the GI Bill and military scholarships, it is the perfect school for those with a hectic schedule.
Park University
Open since 1875, this non-profit, private post-secondary institution has enjoyed an educational partnership with the military for nearly a century.
Central Texas College
Specially designed for military students, veterans and their spouses, this college understands and adapts to the unique challenges of juggling a job, an education and a home life.
University of Maryland University College
With a rich history of educating military history, UMUC offers both hybrid and on-site classes, along with countless education benefits, financial aid options and other forms of assistance.
Liberty University
Proud of their service to those who served, Liberty ensures that earning your degree can be done with the utmost convenience and efficiency.
Staff Sgt. Spencer Stone – whose name emblazoned international headlines in August 2015 after he and two friends subdued an armed terrorist aboard a train bound for Paris – will join five other veterans in attending President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday, Jan. 12.
According to the Military Times, this will be the third time in five months that Stone, now a medical technician at the 60th Medical Operations Squadron at California's Travis Air Force Base, has made an official visit to Washington, D.C.
For subduing the gunman – a heroic action which resulted in a severed thumb and a near-fatal stab wound – Stone earned the Purple Heart and Airman's Medal. He was awarded Belgium and France's top honors as well. On Oct. 31, he was promoted to airman first class. He has plans to leave the Air Force before his enlistment is up at the end of the year.
Stone is just one of the six veterans invited by First Lady Michelle Obama to Tuesday's address.
Maj. Lisa Jaster will be there as well. Jaster, a 37-year-old engineer, became the first female Army Reserve officer – and just the third woman overall – to graduate from Ranger School.
Earl Smith, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War, met Obama in an elevator before he became president. At the time, Smith presented him with his screaming eagle patch, first earned when he was a private, as good luck. Perhaps his presence in the crowd is the president's good luck charm.
The Military Times reported in a separate article that veterans will be a focal point of Obama's speech. While legislators are still upset over the stagnant reform situation at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Obama will point out the progress made in caring for veterans in their life after service, jobs programs and falling rates of veteran homelessness.
A joint announcement from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs on Friday, Dec. 8 confirmed a $5.9 million grant to assist homeless Native American veterans in their life after service. Permanent residences and support services will receive the majority of the funding.
"By targeting resources directly to tribes, we can better honor the service and sacrifice of Native American veterans who now need a roof over their heads," said HUD Secretary Julian Castro, according to The Washington Times. "These heroes deserve hope for a brighter future, and by offering permanent housing solutions, combined with needed services and case management, we can work with tribes to end veteran homelessness."
Twenty-six tribes are recipients of the grant money. They will manage and distribute the HUD housing vouchers to those who require them. According to the Times, the HUD-VA Supportive Housing vouchers are the result of a cross-agency initiative by HUD and the VA to quickly and efficiently house any veteran who has recently become homeless. Counseling and clinical support is also provided.
"Targeting HUD-VASH vouchers to veterans living on tribal lands opens new opportunities for helping Native American veterans exit homelessness as quickly as possible," said VA Secretary Robert McDonald.
Tulsa, Oklahoma station Fox 23 reported that since 2008, close to 80,000 HUD-VASH vouchers have been awarded and about 90,000 homeless veterans have been helped through the program itself. By assisting with rent and other services, the joint-agency venture has proven essential in putting an end to homelessness among former servicemembers.
Last year, Congress authorized an expansion of the program into Indian Country and directed HUD to work with Indian tribes and tribal organizations to make sure that qualifying Native American veterans – at least 500 of whom will benefit directly from the new grant – received all the veterans benefits they had earned.
For years, the economic downturn created some rather difficult labor conditions for millions of Americans to deal with, but those worries have slowly gone away over time thanks to slow but steady recovery. However, this may not have been the case for veterans of the most recent wars in the Middle East.
That group, specifically, had an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent in 2014 – the most recent full year for which data was available – about one-fifth above the 6 percent unemployment rate for non-veterans, according to the Deseret (Utah) News. This was particularly troublesome for women who served in these conflicts, who were unemployed at a rate of 8.5 percent, compared to 6.9 percent for men.
"If you served for four years as an infantryman or driver, it may be difficult for you to see a future in the financial industry or as a mechanic," Kim Morton, a spokesperson for a nationwide veteran's initiative, told the newspaper. "In 2014, roughly 53 percent of post-9/11 veterans dealt with a period of unemployment in their first 15 months out of uniform. Some of those veterans found work only to leave the job within their first year."
Moreover, though, many veterans who have jobs often struggle with underemployment, and others believe that they are overqualified for the work they are doing, the report said. About 1 in 3 respondents to a recent study said that they are dissatisfied with their current work situations for the latter reason.
However, many groups exist to help veterans deal with the rigors of civilian life, and often that kind of assistance is just a phone call or email away. The benefits for veterans these organizations provide may not always be apparent, but they're often relatively easy to find.
It is undoubtedly one of the more unusual methods designed to help ease the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, but that doesn't mean it isn't effective. The papier-mâché masks Melissa Walker, an art therapist and coordinator of healing arts with the National Intrepid Center of Excellence at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, asks veterans to make after returning stateside from Iraq and Afghanistan are vivid, expressive creations.
"It's actually the first art directive they're introduced to as they come through the program," Walker told The Daily Beast. "These are servicemembers that sometimes have trouble verbalizing what they're struggling with and these masks, along with all the artwork [they] create, help to make their invisible wounds visible."
Representing their experiences in combat and their military identities, the masks are incredibly evocative. One described by The Daily Beast is wound with razor wire and its lips sealed by a silver lock, while another succumbs to the pressure of a tightening vice marked with the acronym PTSD.
The veterans' creations have made such an impact that the National Endowment for the Arts has decided to fund an in-depth look at 400 of the masks at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Girija Kaimal, an assistant professor in Drexel's Department of Creative Art Therapies, told DrexelNOW that the masks have helped to create a bond between returning veterans.
"For some service members in the program, the masks become a 'visual community,'" Kaimal told the university's paper. "They see the masks and say, 'I'm not alone.'"
With so many veterans struggling to explain their experiences to families, friends and doctors in their life after service, the masks provide an outlet that doesn't require words.
"A lot of research will tell you that when you're in a traumatic experience, the part of the brain that controls speech shuts down," Kaimal relayed to The Daily Beast. "So having a nonverbal way – such as art – to communicate is key to understanding what they're going through."
Overlong wait times have been one of the Department of Veteran Affairs' biggest and most chronic problems for years. After facing criticism and scandals, the VA has instituted new measures to cut wait times by expanding veteran benefits to allow access to private sector physicians. Even with the recent changes, they have a lot of ground to cover.
According to News Channel 8 in Florida, the national office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars found that, after close analysis, 26 percent of veterans seeking treatment from private doctors still had to wait 30 days or more to get an appointment.
Why the long delays? Until a few months ago, the VA had treated the private sector as a pressure release valve – to be used only in case of emergency.
"VA has traditionally wanted to be everything for every veteran," a VFW senior legislative aid told the news channel. "And what the health care crisis taught is that you know that's not plausible, not very feasible for the VA to provide every instance of care to every veteran."
The Veterans Choice program, unveiled in late 2015, was meant to open up treatment possibilities and cut back on wait times and backlog. So far, however, the program has run into problems, in part due to miscommunication between the VA and Health Net, the contractor paid by VA to schedule appointments, about how many veterans would utilize the new option.
In North Carolina, only minutes from Fort Bragg, a new VA Health Care Center was just opened in Fayetteville. Legislators and VA officials alike promised that new center would brighten the outlook for local veterans, the Fayetteville Observer reported.
Fayetteville, with one of the nation's bigger veteran populations, had some notoriously bad wait times back in summer 2014, when Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson first visited. The new 250,000-square-foot outpatient facility is a big step toward righting that wrong.
"You served our country. You wore the uniform."
That's how a new statewide television ad from the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency begins, according to UPMatters.com. It is a simple message, but one that the agency hopes the state's more than 660,000 veterans take to heart as part of an effort to inform them of all options available.
According to WLNS 6, the ads have appeared on billboards and radio in addition to TV. They all direct servicemembers toward information regarding the veterans benefits and assistance programs available to them. Personnel – many of them with time in the armed forces – are on call all day, every day to answer any questions veterans may have.
The TV ad is especially effective. It features four veterans entering their life after service, preparing for job interviews, exercising and relaxing in retirement. Each of these is representative of education, employment, health care and quality of life – pillars crucial to the MVAA's mission.
"Assistance is just a phone call away," Jeff Barnes, MVAA director, told UPMatters.com. "This TV ad is a reflection of how our agency works to help veterans in all walks of life, whether they took off the uniform six months or 60 years ago."
"As an agency, we have been serving veterans around the clock for nearly three years, but we still hear people say they don't know about us or the services we provide," Barnes continued. "When you see the TV ad or a billboard on the highway, share it with your dad, your niece or your coworker who's a veteran. We want to use this ad campaign as a conversation starter about their service to our country and how MVAA can connect them with the benefit they've earned."
The military trains its personnel well, and the ride-hailing company Uber looks to take advantage of that by recruiting thousands of San Antonio veterans in 2016. By all accounts, it's an arrangement that's beneficial to both parties, KSAT 12 in San Antonio reported.
"They love the flexible work Uber provides, and, as you know, San Antonio has a very large military veteran community," said Chris Nakutis, the company's general manager in Texas.
Both Nakutis and San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor were on hand at a Wednesday Work on Demand event, showing current drivers their appreciation and making efforts to recruit more.
"We are focusing on our veterans, military folks, in using this as an employment option for them as they transition out of the military," said Taylor.
At the moment, about 600 former servicemembers are using Uber to make money as they transition into their life after service.
"Unlike a lot of positions that you have to interview for and/or wait for them to call you, as soon as you pass the background check and do all the essentials that Uber qualifies for you to do, you can get going and you work at your discretion. The sky is the limit," Air Force veteran and current Uber driver David Tolliver told KSAT 12.
San Antonio is just a small part of Uber's wider commitment – called UberMILITARY – to hiring veterans and military family members. According to a recent press release, the company hopes to onboard 50,000 military drivers over the next year and a half.
Uber's partners in the initiative include members of all service branches, a retired four-star general, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. With minds like these serving as advisors, it's no surprise Uber has realized the value of hiring veterans.
No one understands the needs of veterans like a fellow veteran, as Jesse Brown of Plymouth, Massachusetts is proving beyond a doubt. A former Marine, Brown established Heidrea for Heroes – a nonprofit organization supplying home and vehicle modifications, equipment, and various other kinds of support to veterans and their families absolutely free of charge – back in 2013 with the help of Matthew Mastroianni, another veteran.
"We're all in this together," Brown told the Boston Globe.
"The end goal is to help vets," Mastroianni, Brown's business partner, added.
Heidrea for Heroes' origins begin in the 1990s, when Brown and Mastroianni served. According to Heidrea's website, Brown was a Marine Corps field radio operator whose service stations included Camp Pendleton and Okinawa, Japan. Mastroianni, also a former Marine, is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In their life after service, the men founded their own construction firm and saw real success before agreeing that they wanted to help other veterans in some way. Heidrea – a combination of Heidi and Andrea, their wives' names – was the result.
So far, the Globe reported that more than 100 veterans in the Plymouth area have been recipients of the nonprofit's efforts.
"We just got a disabled Vietnam veteran in Rockland an all-terrain wheelchair; he had been an avid hunter but can't walk. Now he can get back out into the woods," said Brown. "And that's the whole thing…giving veterans that independence and freedom they're looking for and deserve."
Some of the organization's funds come from the state, but Brown and Mastroianni say they take none for themselves. Every single donation goes straight to helping veterans, some of whom are stubborn about accepting help.
"That self-identification of need can be a problem sometimes – veterans are proud," Brown explained to the Globe. "We let them know we're there."