I can’t plug that enough it’s helpful talking with others who understand what you’ve been through and doesn’t make you weak. Join the Student Veterans Association on campus for a sense of community. I highly recommend veterans reach out to her.ĭo you have any advice for other veterans? The biggest thing she does is go out of her way to introduce other vets to each other and she connects us with the Student Veterans Association and events like Post-Traumatic Purpose, which are great. Wendy Badman has been exponentially helpful in helping me clear up administrative problems and getting me in touch with resources. How has the Office of Veterans and Military Services helped you? It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced it to understand that. It becomes very difficult to reintegrate back into society. You don’t always get to do what you went there to do, and after you come out you can feel like your service was pointless and like you don’t have a support network. But a lot of people go in expecting one thing and the reality is military service can be boring. There are a lot of people who haven’t deployed and that’s okay. Only 10% of people in the service are combat personnel, but the support people are equally as important. We lose way more people to training accidents and suicides than combat. Is there anything you wish civilians understood about military service? I understand people want to be respectful, but for a lot of us we feel like we haven’t done that much, or we are reminded of traumas that we want to forget about. I don’t usually tell people I’m a veteran because I don’t want to be thanked for it. How do you feel when someone says, “Thank you for your service”? It was nice to have genuine friends and a community. Living in the barracks was its own challenge, but the silver lining is, I knew all my neighbors and I could knock on their door if I was having a tough night. I learned the people who I could rely on, and these are people I’d do absolutely anything for. The biggest thing I learned is the value of true friendship. What did you learn from serving our country? I was unhappy with my career, so one day I stopped by a recruiter’s office on my way to work and I was like, “I hate my job, get me out of here.” It was something that I always wanted to do that I had put off.
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