Support the Troops: Hire Them!

Support the Troops: Hire Them!
Paul Rieckhoff | April 23, 2010

Three years ago, I got an email from an Iraq veteran from Arlington, Virginia named Joe Tryon. His wife, Melissa, also a disabled combat veteran, was undergoing treatment at Walter Reed. Joe and Melissa are 1 of the more than 115,000 dual-military couples today. Together, they faced countless bureaucratic hurdles and endless red tape as they fought to get Melissa the care she had earned.

Today, Joe is facing a new fight: finding a job. For the last 14 months, this West Point graduate and Army Ranger has been unemployed. With his wife 100 percent disabled and unable to work, they are scraping by solely on savings and disability income.

In addition to graduating from one of the top schools anywhere, Joe also holds an MBA in health care administration. He was an officer in the Army for 6 years until he was injured and medically separated from the military. In Iraq, he was platoon leader and later an executive officer in an Anti-Tank company with the 101st Airborne Division. And now he's hoping to get a job doing veterans advocacy work.

Despite his superior qualifications and a good attitude, Joe is still jobless; and he's just one of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed Iraq and Afghanistan veterans relying on savings and unemployment checks nationwide. Last month, unemployment among Iraq and Afghanistan-era vets was an astounding 14.7 percent.

Joe said, "In the military, I was on a good career path, and was developing invaluable leadership skills that I thought would translate to a productive and rewarding professional career. Although I strongly believe any combat leadership outweighs any boardroom experience, again and again I have found this not to be true. I know that me and my veteran peers have far more to offer than what can be expressed on two-dimensional paper and I hope civilian employers can soon recognize that too."

Is they don't back down, and don't take crap.

Much of the power bosses in middle management use, the bad ones, is intimidation or fake auras of authority. Someone who has been in combat, would laugh at that stuff.

There are many good managers that use respect and work with employees, but in many places the bosses try and pull one over on the employees, they can't get away with that very easily with a veteran.


But in the same way, a Veteran in management knows how to treat his employees, and usually is one of the better managers, if they adjust on the ideas of having to follow orders, to getting an employee to want to follow an order.

if we decide to use them. Some Vietnam vets still think we should have nuked Vietnam back to the Stone Age. :wtf:

In other words, everyone should spend a couple years playing poker, and really paying attention, even without any gambling, but just to learn things like that.

:hi:

thank god his wife found one. now, he is a vet, help him out, world.