Former pro football player David Vobora gave up a lucrative career in private fitness to work with wounded warriors. His workouts have brought them new strength and inspiration.
Upstanders is a collection of short stories celebrating ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities produced by Howard Schultz and Rajiv Chandrasekaran. These stories of humanity remind us that we all have the power to make a difference.
Tag: Veterans
This ‘USB Port for the Body’ Is a High-Tech, Pain-Free Solution for Amputees
Prior to losing an arm and a foot when he fell underneath a train in 2012, James Young went on a run pretty much every day after work. After his initial recovery period was over, and he was fitted with prosthetic limbs, Young tried running again. “It wasn’t worth the pain,” he declares. The agony felt by Young didn’t come from the injury or from the prosthetic limb itself. Rather, the socket — the cup that fits over the stump doctors created at the injury site — caused the distress. (The problem is common among many amputees.) “Sockets are, in my opinion, kind of a nightmare,” Young says. They’re “just pain, pain, pain, essentially.”
Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS), located in Cambridge, England, aims to solve the socket problem for good with digital technology. Its solution: an innovation called the Prosthetic Interface Device (PID), which founders Oliver Armitage and Emil Hewage describe as a kind of USB port for the body. Creating a standardized connection between an artificial limb and the body, the PID is surgically implanted at the injury site and a prosthetic limb with a matching connector is plugged directly into it. This revolutionary device is what results when entrepreneurs, surgeons, clinicians and patients collaborate using applied materials, machine learning and neuroscience. Currently in pre-clinical trials, the PID has a projected market release in 2018.
“Today, technology and data intelligence are allowing people to change the way we address and ultimately solve our most pressing social and environmental challenges,” says Tae Yoo, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Cisco. “Digitization is leading to a greater understanding of the connection and interdependency between people, process, data and things. As a company, Cisco strives to inspire, connect and invest in opportunities that accelerate global problem solving; CBAS has an innovative way of tackling this challenge.”
Current sockets pose a number of problems. The fit must be so precise that it continually has to be adjusted, and if a patient gains or loses weight, the socket will need to be refitted or replaced. Even changes in temperature can be enough to noticeably change a socket’s fit. Most patients need a new one every year or two, and because it presses against the skin, a socket can easily cause inflammation, infection and other problems.
CBAS’s device eliminates these problems, drastically improving a patient’s quality of life. Instead of hugging the exterior of the body, the PID connects directly to the skeletal system. This means that the skeleton (not soft tissue, which can easily be damaged or injured) bears the weight of the artificial limb. Connecting to bone also changes the way that the body relates to a replacement limb: “You can have this direct connection to the mechanical, solid parts of the limb, which allows for some proprioception,” or awareness of where the limb is in space, Young explains.
There’s a financial benefit as well. The existing socket-based system for attaching prosthetic limbs to the body is hugely expensive. Every single socket must be custom made and adjusted repeatedly until the fit is perfect. “It’s like someone’s trying to hand-make you some shoes, but they’re always painful, and you’re going to have to keep redoing the process,” explains Hewage.
In contrast, the PID is extremely cost-effective and low-maintenance. Ernst & Young crunched the numbers and found that Cambridge Bio-Augmentation’s PID system could lower the cost of artificial limbs by 60 percent, reducing the need for constant follow-up visits to prosthetic clinics. Any prosthetic limb can be designed to attach to the PID, and a patient can live with the same one for decades. “As an engineer, you constantly benefit from standardization,” says Armitage. “I can buy a bolt from this shop and a nut from this shop and put them together. The prosthetics industry doesn’t have that right now. Making a standardized connector, you enable the rest of the engineers to work with that and move forward and make better devices.”
The advantages of a standardized connection between the body and an artificial limb go far beyond convenience and cost savings. Thanks to some amazing advancements in robotics technology over the past few years, new high-tech bionic limbs can be controlled by patients’ minds (just like a natural limb). The PID can connect with these robotic arms or legs, creating a simple electric connection between the body’s nervous system and the artificial limb.
“It’s not just a standard mechanical connection, it’s a standard electrical connection,” says Armitage. “In order for the mass population of amputees to be able to have access to neutrally-controlled devices, you need a standardized way of communicating with that prostheses. With a PID, the interface between the biology and the engineering has already been done by our product.”
Eventually, the PID could be used to allow other types of devices beyond even the most advanced prosthetic limbs to connect to the body. “I can’t see any way that the USB connector for the body wouldn’t revolutionize the human condition,” Young says, drawing on his first-hand experience with the PID. It’s precisely that kind of blue-sky thinking that drives Hewage and Armitage to continue to innovate, pushing the potential of the PID even further.
To address today’s social and environmental challenges, collaboration and investment in innovative early-stage tech solutions is a must. Digital transformation is well underway in many industries thanks to organizations like Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems. Entrepreneurs who see challenges as opportunities waiting to be solved are already at work — creating, inspiring and helping people thrive.
This article was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur and act as a social change agent.
Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government into the Digital Age
Eight years after President Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, there’s not much evidence of a new era of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. His administration, however, has brought an antiquated, disjointed and inflexible bureaucratic system into the tech age. With a team of 153 people working across agencies, the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) retooled and modernized online applications for student loans, veteran’s healthcare and immigration visas. NationSwell spoke with Haley Van Dyck, a San Francisco native who co-founded the initiative, about running the federal government’s in-house startup.
The President asked you personally to change the government’s online systems. Why did you say yes?
Well, the president is a pretty hard guy to say no to! Honestly, why I’m here is because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. Government is, I think, an overlooked platform for creating change in people’s lives. When you take a platform the size and scale of the United States government and you combine it with the transformative power of technology to create change, it can be a force multiplier for good.
What specifically are you integrating into government operations?
Our team is focused on how we can bring in the best technology talent across the country and pair it with the innovators in government to focus more on the underlying systems. There are services that government provides every single day that are utterly life changing for Americans, and whatever we can do to bring what Silicon Valley has learned about providing planetary-scale digital services that work into services that are in desperate need of upgrades is an incredibly appealing mission.
The federal government currently spends $86 billion on IT projects, but nearly all these projects go over budget or miss deadlines. Two out of every five are shut down. What’s getting in the way?
There are a lot of factors that go into it, so there’s no easy answer. Government still builds software the same way it builds battleships: very expensive, long planning cycles. That is simply not the way that Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large has become one of the most innovative sectors, because it’s found ways to take very, very large projects and break them up into smaller pieces where they’re more approachable and [easier to] deliver results on a much faster, much less risky surface area. I think that is one of the big problems of government — it’s structured to do these large projects, and that’s what it continues to do.
Another problem we run into is just outdated technology. You will still find COBOL [a 1959 computer programming language] alive and well in parts of the United States government, because doing these kinds of technology upgrades are hard and complicated and challenging, and it takes a lot of work. So those two — the mentality as well as the existing technology — combine together make a very, very hard problem to solve. That’s basically what our team is targeting, right?
The rollout of healthcare.gov, by anyone’s assessment, was a logistical disaster and a political nightmare. Did that failure mark a turning point in how the government does its business?
There was obviously a ton of work underway long before healthcare.gov happened to solve this problem. But absolutely, I do think healthcare.gov was an incredibly critical turning point in two big ways. The first and most important one is that the rescue effort of healthcare.gov was one of the first times that many people with technology and engineering backgrounds were able to see how their skill-sets could truly help benefit a large number of their fellow Americans. It really shone a light onto the pathway for public service. The second way in which it was a defining moment was internally across government (for everyone from the White House down) it showed that the status quo right now is the riskiest option. The way the government goes about building software today is not successful and needed to change. That was a critical piece of energy and momentum that we needed to break the inertia and look at the problem from a different perspective.
Tell us a little bit about your first project with “boots on the ground,” where a team streamlined the transfer of health records from the Department of Defense to the Veterans Administration. Why start with such a huge bureaucracy?
If we were filtering for where the easy problems were, we wouldn’t have a ton of business. We ended up very excited and eager to work with the VA because we believe that veterans deserve a world-class experience when applying for the benefits after all they’ve done in service of their country. So it was an incredibly motivating mission.
Where does that project stand now?
We’re really excited because the team is making a ton of traction even in one of the largest, most entrenched bureaucracies in government. We’ve found incredible partners and supporters inside the VA who are really doing the heavy lifting and the hard work of creating culture change inside the agency, as they’re looking at how to improve services for veterans from all angles. The team is focused on two areas. First, how do we improve the experience for the veterans? Right now there are hundreds of websites, all intending to help veterans get access to their benefits. The work being done is streamlining all those service offerings and websites into a single place, where veterans can get better information and access to the benefits. Vets.gov is the new website that we’re building. It’s in beta and it’s launched for education and health benefits, and we continue to add services to it regularly.
The second big areas we spend a lot of time working is on the tools for the dedicated civil servants inside the VA to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their job of providing services to the vets. We just launched a product we’re excited about called Caseflow, which was designed with adjudicators inside the VA. It’s focused on streamlining and improving application processing. We realize that by helping upgrade the outdated systems that a lot of employees were using, we’re able to help the vets themselves.
In what ways is USDS similar to your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech startup? And in what ways would you notice a difference?
We’re in incredible scrappy, bootstrap office spaces, with people running around in jeans, Post-It notes everywhere, tons of white boards and big discussions happening left and right. In many ways it looks and feels very, very similar to many of the startups you see across the country. But a couple of ways that it’s different, we’re actually quite proud of. For example, we have a very diverse team and are over 50 percent women, which I think makes different from a lot of companies in the Valley.
You’ve mentioned that USDS is easing arduous applications and centralizing contact information in one website. How does that work actually benefit the most vulnerable Americans?
I don’t want to pontificate too much on the status of our tech industry, but as you see various tech companies create change across the industry, they’re simplifying and improving the lives of Americans and really taking out a lot of the biggest inconveniences that we have. It is absolutely imperative that our government makes that same jump to providing services the same way that the rest of the industry does. The internet is obviously a huge conduit for that. In order to make sure that divide doesn’t become larger, between the people who are benefiting from the tech revolution and those who aren’t, government should make sure that we are also modernizing our services for the primary platform where people are looking to do business and communicate.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s the only channel. We, as the government, do not have the luxury of segmenting our audiences the way that most companies do. We can’t just care about people on the internet. We have to care about those who don’t have access. But by the work we’re doing through actual user-centered design and modern technology stacks, we are able to do things like design for mobile, which is also addressing a huge percentage of Americans who now have access to internet only through smartphones and not through broadband. So I think that it’s an incredibly important part of the conversation, but it’s also not the entire conversation.
MORE: This Is a Smart, Nonpartisan Way to Improve Local Government
For Veterans Facing Employment Difficulties, This Boot Camp Boosts Their Tech Skills
“Thank you for your service, but we can’t accept you for this position.” That’s what Jerome Hardaway, an Air Force veteran, heard from several potential employers after he returned stateside from three tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Coming home amidst the second worst economic slowdown this country had ever seen didn’t help, but Hardaway suspects being fresh out of the armed services was a big problem to those looking over his résumé. “Inheriting the stigma of the Vietnam veteran, some people considered us unskilled or untrained,” he says. Today, with the economy largely back on track, Hardaway still hears about comrades struggling to find jobs. The overall veteran unemployment rate recently fell below the civilian unemployment rate, hitting a seven-year low of 3.9 percent in October 2015, but that still means about 422,000 veterans are out of work.
“For a lot of these [employers], the last person that served in their family was in World War II. We’ve gotten so far from there. If you served your country then, you knew you were not going to go homeless, that you’d get a job,” Hardaway says. “We’ve gone from joining the military being the best decision of your life to now, it could possibly put you in a worse position.”
To change that, Hardaway started looking for work in a rapidly growing sector: the tech world. The barriers to entry, like knowing how to code and compute, were higher there, but so was the possibility of finding a high-paying job. Hardaway had some experience — he started fiddling with computers in 2007, while stationed in Iraq, mostly “as a way to keep my sanity,” — but it was General Assembly’s 12-week boot camp in 2014 and a full-ride scholarship from the group’s Opportunity Fund that helped him transition to a full-time career in coding. Now, Hardaway is paying it forward by setting a goal of helping 1,000 fellow veterans follow him into software development.
When Hardaway enlisted, the wars in the Middle East were still new. Soldiers hadn’t started coming home, and the recruiters were persuasive, appealing to his patriotism and the sense of duty he felt coming from a military family. Hardaway, to be sure, doesn’t regret his service — “I’m happy I did it because I wouldn’t be where I am now,” he says, but finding financial stability as an African-American male and combat veteran in Tennessee was tough. Hardaway occasionally found freelance web design gigs, but on the whole, Memphis felt more “old-folksy” than “tech-savvy,” he says. “They call themselves a city,” he jokes. “They have tall buildings, but it’s really a town.” Its social structure operates on who you know, and Hardaway missed six and a half years of making connections while deployed.
He considered enrolling in a degree program, but he couldn’t find a school that offered what veterans needed as “24-year-olds reintegrating into civilian society.” A class might teach him HTML or CSS, but he wanted a foundation of strong logical reasoning to solve problems that would come up on the job. By chance, he saw a post about General Assembly’s Opportunity Fund on Facebook and applied. The first year, his application was rejected. Determined, he reapplied the following year. Within a week of losing his job, he was accepted for a boot camp in Manhattan.
He says practicing, “just making us solve problems every day,” was the most helpful part of his experience. “It’s like boxing,” he tells other veterans. “I can teach you how to throw all the punches, but you’re not going to be able to know if your first punch should be the right cross or an uppercut.” Now, he knows which tools to use and when. He says he’s started to think like a programmer, rather than a guy who liked messing around with computers.
“I tell people I’ve gone from no job to having one. I can’t understate the importance of General Assembly,” he says. “But I don’t feel like I’m special. I was willing to do the work. I went from being fired to being hired and getting invited to the White House.”
Dressed in sharp suits, a fan of shaken martinis and hot bowls of ramen, Hardaway today might not appear like the stereotype of a veteran. But his military training quickly comes out in conversation. “Roger that,” he wrote in an email about setting up an interview. His yes and no are “negative” and “affirmative,” and they’re often followed by a “Sir.” Above all, Hardaway strives to live up to the Air Force’s core value of excellence in all you do. That’s the principle that guides his nonprofit, Vets Who Code, in closing “the digital talent gap” for veterans. (A celebration of the group is why Hardaway went to the White House.)
Hardaway says veterans are particularly attuned to tech, because from the minute they enter basic training, they’re constantly working on solving problems in high-stress situations. While some employers may doubt those skills can translate from the battlefield to an office, Hardaway is blazing a path for other warriors to follow by sitting down at the keyboard.
Watch the video above to see how General Assembly helped Hardaway achieve a career in the tech sector.
MORE: The School That’s Making a Career in Tech Possible for Everyone
This Is Why Hollywood’s Depiction of Veterans Must Change
When it comes to seeing veterans on the big screen, Tom Cruise leading a protest from his wheelchair in “Born on the Fourth of July” or Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro playing a final game of Russian roulette in “The Deer Hunter” probably come to mind. But Hollywood’s usual portrayal of service members being physically and psychologically wounded is too narrow, says Charlie Ebersol, a Los Angeles-based TV and film producer. “It’s so staid and boring.”
Having on-screen veterans look like ordinary Americans, however, causes our views and politics will change, Ebersol believes. So along with Got Your 6 and support from the White House, he developed a certification system for films and television shows that “contain a representative and balanced depiction of veterans.” (Think: Chris Pratt playing a Navy veteran in the blockbuster Jurassic World, or the latest season of Dancing with the Stars, which featured an Army vet and double amputee doing the Tango.)
NationSwell recently spoke to Ebersol by phone from Southern California about the role Hollywood should be playing in bridging the civilian-military divide.
What misconceptions does traditional media perpetuate about veterans?
That they’re either heroes or they’re victims; they either need our help or they don’t need any help at all. It’s not binary, and the real story is so much more complex and interesting, in that, you have great opportunity in all these veterans coming home, but we don’t take advantage of it because we think they all have PTSD or hero syndrome.
How are you personally changing that narrative?
In keeping with Hollywood tradition, I operate from a philosophy that if you offer some sort of shiny prize or award to producers, they will do what they need to do to get said prize. So we’ve been certifying movies and television shows that do a good job telling veterans’ stories. Lo and behold, people started telling better veterans’ stories when they got a gold star at the end of their show or movie.
Should filmmakers be meeting with veterans to turn their stories into films?
It’s literally that simple. The problem is that, for so long, we were trying to drum up support for the veterans coming home. To do that, people have always [done something similar] to those ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) commercials where the dogs look really pathetic and what’s her name — [Sarah] McLachlan — is playing her sad song. You may donate money, but what they found was the best way to get people to actually adopt dogs was to show how much fun and how fabulous these dogs were.
After Word War II, veterans came back and people wanted to hire them because they were highly trained. They knew they did well under pressure, and some people started really reaching out. We don’t do that [today]. So when you look for a story, all you really have to do is talk to a veteran, say, “Thank you for your service. Can you tell me about interesting people that are in your lives or unique stories?” And the majority of the stories you’re going to hear are not going to be stories of, “oh, my buddy who’s got a massive drinking problem and is living on the street,” because that’s such a fraction of the population. A lot of the stories are going to be about guys who served two or three tours and now they run a hardware shop or now they’re working in a corporation or are in the tech business. Those stories make for interesting characters.
In telling these stories, what have you learned about what defines an American soldier?
Loyalty, duty and commitment. As an employer, when I’m interviewing somebody, if I could know inherently those were a person’s three strongest traits, that would be the ultimate cheat sheet. That’s the beauty of hiring a veteran. You know going in that that person is loyal, feels a sense of duty and is all about commitment because the guy or girl put themselves in harm’s way for their country and for their fellow soldier or sailor or airman. That’s what you’re looking for in a company, in a family, in a friend. You want people that you know are going to show up, and nobody shows up like the military.
What can the rest of us do to support veterans?
The platitude needs to stop being, “Thank you for your service,” and actualize that into something meaningful. The yellow ribbon and the stickers, that’s all well and good, but that’s not actually translating into anything. We have to look past that and ask, “How are we creating job opportunities? How are we creating community support where we’re embracing these people?” A lot of people want to do it under the guise of “They served our country, so we owe them.” That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t get me wrong: You do have to take into account that we enjoy our freedoms because of them. But I think the other side of it is significantly more important; they have show their true character and their true colors, and in showing us that and in being trained, at the absolute worst, they are certainly the best qualified people for almost any job.
It’s rare that the person I hire into my company is the most suited because they went to the right types of schools; it’s always about how they act under pressure and how they understand teamwork and the mission being bigger than the man or woman. Veterans are always significantly better at that than anyone else.
MORE: Why Is It So Hard to Understand What It’s Like to Be a Veteran?
The Power of Video Games to Heal America’s Heroes, A Surefire Way to Keep Students in School and More
How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon
U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.”
What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times
The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers.
The Bag Bill, The New Yorker
A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs?
Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags.
MORE: The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War
What Wives of Veterans Can Learn from Female Soldiers, How Doctors Are Saving the Lives of Gunshot Victims Before the Trigger Is Ever Pulled and More
What Army Wives Need to Understand About Female Soldiers, The Washington Post
Much is said about bridging the military-civilian divide, but as writer (and wife of a veteran) Lily Burana realizes, there’s also a distance between the women who proudly sport the uniform and those who are married to someone wearing it. Knowing that the military is full of inspirational females — including those now serving in the Ranger division — Burana set out to build a bridge the only way she knew how: by sitting down to lunch and having a chat.
Are Doctors the Key to Ending Philly Gun Violence? Philadelphia Magazine
Renowned for providing lifesaving medical treatment to kids, doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are focusing their efforts on reducing the cycle of youth violence that plagues the City of Brotherly Love. The hospital’s Violence Intervention Program (VIP) grew out of internal discussions about the Sandy Hill Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., and a shocking report from the city government, which found that 5,051 Philadelphia youth were shot or murdered between 2006 and 2012. It’s difficult to know for sure if the screenings, bully prevention lessons and intensive counseling sessions, which make up VIP, is reducing the number of gunshot victims, but the outlook is hopeful, considering most participants say they desire to be a normal teenager, not one packing heat.
The Power of Vision in Urban Governance, Governing
Every politician may have the goal of being dubbed a “visionary leader,” but Indianapolis’s former four-term mayor, Bill Hudnut, actually was. In order to bring forth the Midwestern city’s potential, Hudnut enlisted help from Indianapolis business and philanthrophic leaders and economic development experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together, these heavy-hitters combined their strengths, collaborating on a plan that eventually brought $1 billion to the local economy — proving that collective vision and use of community assets is key to long-term impact.
When You Picture a Soldier, You Probably Don’t Have This in Mind
When you think of special operations forces in Afghanistan, you probably picture a group of men: buff, tattooed and sunburnt. But right beside some of them, a “band of sisters” kept them safe. In her 2015 book “Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield,” journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon details a little-known Army program that assigned all-female units to support male soldiers. Known as Cultural Support Teams (CST), these women helped gather intelligence from mothers and daughters in Afghan households, while male counterparts conducted raids to find insurgents.
“In a conservative and traditional society like Afghanistan, particularly places where the insurgency was strongest, male soldiers — no matter how good they were at fighting — could not speak to Afghan women,” Lemmon recounts at a Got Your 6 Storytellers event in Los Angeles. Lemmon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who spent an extensive amount of time in Afghanistan for her previous book “The Dressmaker of Khair Khana,” reported the story of Lt. Ashley White and her unit through hundreds of hours of interviews over the course of two years. In an interview with NationSwell, Lemmon discussed what she learned about women’s role in the military during her research.
What inspired you to share the story of CST in Afghanistan?
It was the impossibility of the story on the surface — this group of teammates who became friends and then family at a time when women officially were banned from ground combat. Here was a group of Americans who answered their country’s call to serve, who went onto the battlefield alongside Rangers and SEALs, and who were forever changed by it. They broke ground in service to their country, and we didn’t know them. I wanted to share this slice of history we didn’t know.
While embedded, what did you learn about what it means to serve as an American soldier?
I saw young Americans going in and out of Afghanistan, risking their lives for their nation and for the friends they had come to love. I wanted to share that connection, that friendship, that desire to serve.
What does camaraderie look like in an all-female unit?
Much the same as in an all-male unit. It was about friendship and sisterhood and caring for one another — only it was even more extreme because they were all they had out there, the only people who knew and understood all that they saw and did at the tip of the spear while women officially weren’t there.
How did meeting these female warriors change your idea of womanhood?
This story took me into a world I had never known of women who were funny and fierce, driven and kind, intense and warm. So many times the women we see on our pages or on our screens are one or the other. I wanted to show these women in all their dimensions and to tell a story that was true to who they are and were.
What three words describe your experience abroad?
Afghanistan is a generous, inspiring and heartbreaking place.
What is the quality you most admired in the troops you met?
Tenacity and grit alongside great heart.
How can someone support veterans?
Get involved. Listen to veterans’ stories. Help veterans with their transition into the next phase of life and be aware of the wars we have asked them to fight. Too many are too distant from the battle and don’t want to hear what it was like for the 1 percent of the country that has fought 100 percent of its 15 years of war. That must change.
What unique challenges do female veterans face?
We must recognize that veterans are women and women are veterans. We must expand our version of the veteran to make sure it includes women and the valor they have shown these past decades of war. Otherwise, our antiquated views of what women have and are doing keeps us as a country from offering the respect and the support they deserve from us.
MORE: This Resourceful Soldier Goes From Fighting on the Front Lines to Running a Fashion Line
Why Is It So Hard to Understand What It’s Like to Be a Veteran?
As soon as he wrapped up his studies in film and literature at Boston University, Henry Hughes followed family tradition and signed up for the Army. For the next five years, he took fire, dodged IEDs and grappled internally with the meaning of military service while on two tours of duty in Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. After Hughes returned home and earned another degree from the American Film Institute, he began making movies, including his short film,“Day One,” which tells the story of a female Army interpreter facing a moral quandary during her first day on the job: saving the newborn child of a known enemy. The film was nominated for this year’s Academy Award for best live-action short.
NationSwell spoke to Hughes, a Got Your 6 Storyteller, by phone from Los Angeles about the lingering questions from war and their portrayal on film.
What inspired you to serve your country?
For me, it was a long family tradition. We basically had someone in the Army since the [American] Revolution. I wanted to be part of that tradition.
Is there one question that you continually ask yourself about your experience?
It’s probably, “why is it not so simple?” It’s a very complex part of my life, not something that is full of simply good memories or simply bad memories: it’s a mixture of all types of life. So I always wonder why it’s not like anything else. At this point, why can’t it be simpler? Why is it so difficult for everyone to understand it?
I’m guessing that’s why did you decided to make the film “Day One?”
For sure, it’s about those questions. There’s not a reducible answer like the one I just tried to give you. So that’s why I thought I could make a movie about it instead, to kind of show the way it felt. So the movie is not a true-to-life of what exactly happened to me that one day. But the feeling when I’m watching the movie, it’s that sublime space of things that are horrible and beautiful in the same breath.
What’s the most important lesson civilians can take away from art that’s made about war?
I would say that everyone’s wartime experience is subjective. I don’t know if there’s some sort of universal experience.
What’s your favorite movie about war?
For me, it’s “The Thin Red Line.” I think it touches me because there’s no other war movie like it, that accepts the soulfulness of the warrior experience. A lot of movies don’t go that way, they kind of go along the more visceral, more experiential route.
What is the quality you most admire in a comrade?
What I actually admire most is hard to come by in our community: vulnerability. When it’s a vulnerability to look at your military experience, I really love meeting those people.
Who was the most inspirational person you encountered while serving?
I would say my interpreter on my second tour. She’s the one I based the movie on, or it’s inspired by her. She’s an Afghan-American woman, naturalized as an American citizen, but born over there. The deck was stacked against her, and she looked inside herself to find out what she thought was right and wrong. It wasn’t something that someone told her to do. She just had incredible integrity.
If you could change one thing about your service, what would it be?
I wouldn’t want one of my guys to be wounded or for any of my guys to die.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I would probably say chasing down my wife. It was a long shot, and it worked out. In 2010, after my first tour, I flew to New York without knowing she was there. We hadn’t spoken in a long time. We knew each other as children, when we were 13, and I hadn’t seen her in a number of years. I thought I could track her down, and so on Facebook messenger, I basically said, “Hey, I just landed in New York. Let’s hang out. We haven’t seen each other in a decade.” We went on one date and then a few more dates. She started me writing me a lot of letters when I was in Afghanistan again for my second tour, and we decided to be together.
How can the rest of us, as civilians, do more to support veterans?
Just look at them as people first. I feel like there’s a big divide on some level, but a lot of it is imagined. The fact of the matter is that all of those veterans are just people. I would look at them that way first and then look at their experience.
To you, what does it mean these days to be a veteran?
Well, it’s inescapable, I suppose. The definition of being a veteran is you can never not be a veteran one once you are one. And that speaks to, I think, how profound that experience is. There’s no way you can stop being a veteran.
The Forecast for These Veterans’ Career Prospects Is Sunny
In a sunlit office building in northwest Austin, Texas, former Marine Corps electro-optical technician Logan Razinski greets his boss, a one-time sailor who maintained naval nuclear reactors. The day’s work ahead between the two soldiers won’t involve military operations, however. Both are now employees for SunPower, a solar energy company.
Razinski, a lance corporal (not “one of those movie star ranks”) who was previously stationed at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, found the job through a Department of Energy-sponsored program, Solar Ready Vets (SRV), which prepares former service members to work in the solar energy industry. Living in California, where utilities will get one-third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, Razinski saw the field “growing like wildfire” and joined SRV’s first cohort. After receiving four weeks of intensive training (since expanded to six) covering photovoltaic panel installation, electrical grids and local building codes, Razinski interviewed and landed a job with SunPower, where he now remotely controls utility-scale arrays.
“There is still an alarming mix of veterans, who, as soon as they get out, look for work or try the college thing, and, for some reason, that doesn’t work out. Next thing, you know, they’re living on the street,“ Razinski says. Nationwide, in 2014, close to 50,000 vets lacked housing, and 573,000 lacked jobs. With SRV, “I went from somebody who was in the Marine Corps to being a far cry from the poverty line,” he adds.
So far, Solar Ready Vets has trained nearly 200 soldiers at five pilot bases: Camp Pendleton, Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Fort Carson in Colorado, Fort Drum in New York and Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.
While the connection between military service and solar power might seem tenuous, Razinski says it’s about transitioning workers with proven leadership skills into industries that need talent now. As the solar industry adds new jobs 12 times faster than the overall economy, America’s veterans are a natural fit for various positions. “In an industry that’s growing as rapidly as the solar industry, you need somebody to actually be promotable. You need somebody who’s going to understand the magnitude of the situation and say, ‘Holy cow, this is growing faster than anybody anticipated,’” he says.
“This is definitely a path that I believe in,” Razinski adds. “I see it going nowhere but up.”
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