Chris Lawrence of CNN reports live from Fort Hood, U.S. Army base in Texas on how the national unemployment rate may be very high, but it is even higher for jobless veterans. Lawrence states that 1000 U.S. Army veterans at Fort Hood alone are leaving the service every month. Lawrence says recent veterans have an unemployment rate that was over 10% before the rest of the country as whole did. He added that over 160,000 U.S. Army veterans are currently unemployed and seeking jobs.
Lawrence interviews a female soldier who is leaving the Army and will soon be seeking a civilian job. She says she is stressed-out by the fact that she will soon become a civilian and describes it as a “frightening transition.” After three deployments to Iraq, taking fire on the battlefield and having vehicles blown out from under her, the soldier’s biggest challenge is finding a job and starting a family.
Reporter Lawrence then travels to Fort Hood’s Transition Office where he is told that the biggest challenge for those making the transition to civilian life is to “make military skills relevant on a resume in the civilian world.” Lawrence notes that in the civilian corporate world, individual employee efforts are known to their employers, but that in the military the emphasis is always on team efforts and that the gap is hard to bridge for many job seeking soldiers these days. Most of the soldiers headed for civilian life say that they hope the military discipline and experience they received in actual war will “make up for what they lack” on their resumes as civilian employee hopefuls.
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