Veterans of recent wars confront grim employment landscape

[unhappycamper]

David Fuertes, age 22, is seen dressed in his Police Cadet Corps uniform, at his home in College Point, NY. Fuertes is in the Marine Reserves and served in Iraq.



Veterans of recent wars confront grim employment landscape
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 30, 2010; 12:25 AM

IN HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. During the seven months that he was stationed in Iraq, Joe Janssen served as an assaultman, a job that involved manning the turret gun in a Humvee and using shoulder-fired rockets and other explosives to support his fellow Marines.

~snip~

Janssen's experience is common among the 2 million veterans of the long-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As they return home to the worst labor market in generations, the veterans who are publicly venerated for their patriotism and service are also having a harder time than most finding work, federal data show.

While their nonmilitary contemporaries were launching careers during the nearly 10 years the nation has been at war, troops were repeatedly deployed to desolate war zones. And on their return to civilian life, these veterans are forced to find their way in a bleak economy where the skills they learned at war have little value.

Some experts say the grim employment landscape confronting veterans challenges the veracity of one of the central recruiting promises of the nation's all-volunteer force: that serving in the military will make them more marketable in civilian life.

"That (promise) works great in peacetime," said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower under President Ronald Reagan who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "But that does not work too well in war. . . . If you are in there four years and deployed twice, what kind of skills have you learned other than counterinsurgency?"

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

1. Not just "recent wars"

Unemployed veterans from the Vietnam years (and panama, somalia, grenada, yugoslavia, lebanon, etc) are also having difficulty finding work.

Curious, if Janssen hasn't been hired by any police force, why is he wearing a cadet uniform? Isn't that something that would be bought or issued at the police basic training academy?

I'd guess the police forces would be giving priority to the ex-MP's. I'm not sure that the job of Humvee turret gunner is any kind of preparation for a job as a civilian cop. There may be more to the story.

:hi: