Click here for video of the address.

Thank you Chancellor Ward, deans and distinguished professors, friends and family, Bucky Badger, and of course the graduating class of 2011.  It is an honor to be here today, and to be allowed to share with you this incredible milestone in your life.

I remember my own graduation, just six short years ago.  In the weeks and months leading up to it, I ignored the repeated emails asking me to reserve my gown with the University bookstore.  When, one week before the ceremony, I finally decided to go in and purchase one, I sauntered up to the counter, chest full of pride, and said “I need a graduation gown.”  Without even looking up from his Daily Cardinal, the guy behind the counter asked, “Name?”  Not knowing why needing my name was necessary I responded, “Jacob Wood.”  He typed it into the computer, and, in between obnoxious sips of Starbucks coffee, stated, “you didn’t reserve one.”  I soon learned the hard way that the bookstore doesn’t keep gowns stocked for six-foot-six, two hundred and forty pound men, and that as far as gowns were concerned, I was out of luck.  Running out of options, I quickly called a couple of guys on the football team that had graduated the previous December; after a few calls, I finally found a gown that would fit.  Disaster averted!  On the day of the ceremony I showed up here, to the Kohl Center, with my family in tow…only to find out that the gowns had changed.  You see, my gown was a shimmering sateen black, standing amid an ocean of dark, dull matte cloth.  My mother, who knew the level of procrastination I was capable of, was mortified.  When asked by my peers what the deal was with my gown, I simply responded, “It’s an honors robe.”  And thus began my glorious transition to Wisconsin Alum.

I am sure that many of you were hoping for a more distinguished speaker to come here today and deliver this charge.  Unfortunately, Aaron Rodgers, President Obama, Lady Gaga and that dude on the show Happy Endings who wears the Wisconsin hat, all had other things going on.  The Badger Herald Editorial Staff shed light on this issue in a recent article; and I quote, “Although the efforts of current class officers are appreciated, the university’s inconsistent organizing of commencement events from year to year ensures the absence of top-tier speakers.”  Well, I may not be top-tier, but I’m certainly happy to be here.

So why am I here?  I’m a graduate, but only made the Dean’s List one semester and have nothing to do with stem-cell research.  I played football, but was an under-performing scholarship athlete and never even sniffed the NFL.

I suppose I am here because six years ago I made a choice.  Six years ago I chose to take my double major from this incredible, world-class institution and trade it in for a rifle and a pair of dusty boots.  I enlisted into the United States Marine Corps infantry, as a private, and was shipped out to Southern California to begin my training.  A year later I was in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle with the Second Battalion of the Seventh Marine Regiment.  Two weeks after arriving, my squad of thirteen men was attacked; I lost a friend, Blake Howey, in the explosion and my squad leader Sergeant Rosenberger was wounded and evacuated.  I am proud to say that today, at this very moment in Pennsylvania, Kyle Rosenberger is being commissioned a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and our nation’s military will be in good hands for years to come.  After that night I was promoted to corporal, and for the next seven months I helped lead that squad through more explosions, ambushes and firefights.  We lost more men, more limbs and more innocence, and at the end of 2007 we returned home different men than when we had left.

The next year I joined the prestigious Scout-Sniper platoon.  I went to sniper school, where for three months everyday was an excruciating test of mental and physical willpower.  Sniper school is one of the most difficult schools the military offers, with a selection process that begins way in advance of the first day; of the 34 men that started my class, less than half would graduate.  Only three weeks after graduating I found myself in Afghanistan, working on a six man team in the Helmand Valley.  For seven months our little team ran reconnaissance missions in the most dangerous city, in the most dangerous province, in the most dangerous country, on earth.  Every night we would leave the wire and walk into a countryside controlled by the Taliban, trying to wrestle back control for the Afghan government.

I want to share with you a lesson I learned while on those nightly missions in Afghanistan.  I was the point man in my team, which simply means that when we walked on patrol, I walked in front.  More simply put, if there was a land mine or booby trap laid on our path, I was going to be the man to step on it.  For the first few months I would walk our routes in perpetual fear, afraid every step I took would be my last—it caused me to miss checkpoints and lose my footing and make more noise than we could afford to make.  It wasn’t until I learned to let go of my fear, to walk those nights with confidence and cool, that I became an effective point man.  There were still intersections I had to cross that required me to close my eyes and clench my teeth, but I never stopped pressing on.  As you leave here today, you embark on a similar journey—you’ll have fewer landmines, but you’ll perhaps have more uncertainty. You enter adult life with a downtrodden economy, an uncertain labor market, foreign markets in shambles, and two political parties unwilling to create solutions.  You will begin jobs, relationships and endeavors and come to intersections in life that will make you cringe.  You will be tempted to tread cautiously, to hunker down and wait; but I challenge you to move forward boldly, to live life fully and to never look back.

After Afghanistan I left the Marine Corps in October of 2009 and began applying to graduate school; like every young adult my age, when you have no plan for your professional life, you go get an MBA.  I finished my applications in early 2010; only days later I woke up, much like I had on 9/11, and turned on the news.  Unbeknownst to me, an earthquake had ripped through Port Au Prince only hours before. The images that greeted me on the screen were ones of utter destruction; I sat and watched, transfixed, for hours, before finally deciding that I needed to go and help.  In the following hours I scrambled to assemble a team.  I called numerous friends who had numerous excuses not to go, until I called my former Wisconsin roommate, Jeff Lang.  I posed the question to him, “Jeff, will you go to Haiti with me?”  His response was simple: “Sure dude.”  We started raising money and awareness on Facebook, and within minutes I received a call from my friend and fellow Marine, William McNulty.  I picked up the phone and he immediately stated, “Jake, It’s McNulty.  I want in.”

Team Rubicon was born, and within 96 hours we were in Port Au Prince, surrounded on all sides by sights of destruction, smells of burning debris, and the screams of thousands of injured.  For the next two weeks we worked in small, fast moving teams, we went into parts of the city other response organizations wouldn’t go because of security concerns and conducted medical triage clinics.  In that brief period of time we treated thousands of patients, and saved hundreds of lives.  There in Haiti we discovered the first of two problems that Team Rubicon seeks to address; that problem is that the current disaster response system is inadequate; it’s slow, inefficient, lacks transparency, and isn’t engaging the best talent.  Military veterans, however, have spent 10 years honing the skills needed to provide life saving medical care, logistical support and risk mitigation in situations similar to those found in disaster zones.

The second problem we address presented itself nine months ago, after Team Rubicon had deployed teams to crises situations in Chile, Burma, Pakistan and Sudan; it manifested when one of Team Rubicon’s original members, and a dear friend of mine whom I had served both my tours alongside, killed himself in Houston, Texas.  His name was Clay Hunt, and he was an incredible human being, and an adopted Badger fan.  Clay didn’t kill himself because of what happened to us in Iraq and Afghanistan, he killed himself because of what he lost when he came home—purpose, self worth and community.  When the dust settled, we reevaluated Team Rubicon’s mission and decided that this second problem—the issue of veteran reintegration—was more important, and we’ve renewed our focus on providing our nation’s veterans with an opportunity to continue their service, only this time they’re using the skills they learned for war to help their neighbors following disasters.  Mother nature has provided plenty of opportunity, with tornadoes ripping through Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and Hurricane Irene beating down the Eastern Seaboard.

So now you are sitting there, and you are asking yourself, “So what? What do Haiti and Clay Hunt have to do with me?”  It’s really quite simple.  You see, many of you sitting here today have the next five years of your life mapped out, you have it all planned—you are going to go work on Wall Street, or Obama’s campaign, or at any number of the corporations headquartered in Minneapolis or Chicago, because the job market will not affect you; you will get married and buy a house, because the credit crisis will be over by then; soon enough your children will go to college, because tuition costs will stop rising.  My friends, I want to let you in on a little secret that only took me five years to learn…life might have other plans.  And here’s another secret…that might not be a bad thing.  You will face obstacles and choices and problems that you will not anticipate.  I ask that when you see an obstacle, that you climb it; a choice, that you make it; and a problem, that you solve it.  And if you do those things, if you clench your teeth and close your eyes and walk forward into that uncertainty, then I will let you in on my final secret…you just might fail.  But failure isn’t always bad—I failed as a football player, and it made me a United States Marine.

I want to leave you with one final story.  While in Afghanistan my sniper team was embedded for a few weeks with an Afghan Army unit. One of the soldiers looked eerily like Ashton Kutcher, since he was a native Pashtun, we naturally called him Pashtun Kutcher.  One day I was sitting around a small fire sharing tea with the soldiers; wearing a camouflaged Wisconsin Badgers hat that I would often don between patrols.  At one point in the gathering Pashtun Kutcher leaned over and tugged on the brim of the hat, he pointed at the Motion-W, and asked through an interpreter what it meant.  Again through the interpreter, I told him that it was my University.  Not understanding me, I quickly explained that it was a place where young men and women gathered to live, learn and of course, party together.  At first, the idea of Western Universities offended Pashtun Kutcher’s conservative moral code; but after a minute of staring off into the sky and nodding to himself intently, he said something to the interpreter, who then turned to me and said in broken English, “Mr. Jake, he said that maybe one day, Kandahar can have such a place.”

I tell you this story, not to shed light on progress in Afghanistan, but to shed light on progress in America.  You see, in a few moments you will walk across this stage and receive a diploma from one of the great public institutions in this country; the University of Wisconsin exists because of the great state of Wisconsin, and the state of Wisconsin exists because of this nation that we live in—and it comes back full circle, because the United States is made possible by people like you.  We are living at a time when Congress has an all-time low approval rating, crooks abound at the tops of industry and scandal permeates our nation’s most respected institutions.  If we choose to focus only on that it is easy to be discouraged, but, if we remember that we have the greatest framework ever created to enact change—freedom to speak, freedom to learn, freedom to decide and elect—then we can make it better.  Other places in this world hope to one day achieve what we have at our fingertips; in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, let us embrace it.

On, Wisconsin.

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KMBC: Vets Group That Helps In Disasters Opens KC Office

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Jake Wood serves as President of Team Rubicon, the organization he co-founded following the massive earthquake in Haiti. Team Rubicon unites the unique skills America’s returning veterans offer with the expertise of medical professionals; all while interactively engaging donors through social media. As president, Jake is focusing on establishing Team Rubicon’s organizational vision in order to direct sustainability and scalability.

As a leading veteran advocate, Jake speaks around the country on the issues facing returning veterans. He is also a member of numerous veteran-focused committees, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Veteran Innovation Center Executive Operating Committee and the VA Emergency Response Committee. Jake has authored and published articles related to veteran issues and disaster response in outlets such as the Huffington Post and Foreign Policy.

Prior to Team Rubicon, Jake served 4 years in the United States Marine Corps. He was the Honor Graduate of his platoon in boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) San Diego and continued his training at the Camp Pendleton School of Infantry. Jake graduated at the top of his School of Infantry (SOI) class of more than 300 students and was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. In 2007 he deployed with 2/7 to Iraq’s Anbar Province as a fire team leader. Following an IED blast in which his squad leader was severely wounded, Jake was combat meritoriously promoted to corporal and made squad leader. Following his tour, Jake was awarded the Navy-Marine Corps Commendation Medal with “V” for valor in the face of the enemy.

Upon returning from Iraq, Jake was offered a spot in the prestigious Scout Sniper Platoon. He attended the Scout Sniper Basic Course at Camp Pendleton and graduated 11 weeks later at the top of his class. He once again deployed with 2/7, this time to Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley in 2008; earning multiple commendations for his actions. Jake finished his career as an instructor at the Pre Scout Sniper Course in Camp Pendleton and left the Marine Corps a Sergeant.

Jake Wood holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin with a double major in business and political science. He played football for the Badgers for 4 years on a full athletic scholarship and was twice selected to the Academic All-Big Ten football team. In 2010, the University of Wisconsin awarded Jake with its “Forward Under Forty” award.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on the development and expansion of Team Rubicon, the 501(c)(3) veteran service and disaster response organization I co-founded in 2010. We are trying to secure corporate sponsors that will enable us to expand our domestic veteran engagement initiatives aimed at challenging veterans to continue their service in their local communities.

Where did the idea for Team Rubicon come from?

It was born out of the desperation that my co-founder, William McNulty, and I saw following the Haiti earthquake. Both former Marines, we realized that we were uniquely suited to help out in the chaotic situation developing in Port-au-Prince.

What does your typical day look like?

A lot of my day is devoted to email and conference calls, trying to establish relationships with adjacent organizations and pursuing funding opportunities–all this in addition to coordinating the development and execution of our programs.

How do you bring ideas to life?

We are an organization dedicated to action. In fact, one of our initial taglines was, “Inaction is not an option.” We believe that the moment a problem or issue is identified, it is imperative to address and solve it immediately–no matter how large or small. I think that it’s an attitude you’ll find in a lot of young veteran entrepreneurs; the status quo isn’t good enough.

What is the worst job you ever had and what did you learn from it?

Selling life insurance as an intern. It was horrible because of the cold calling, but it taught me a lot about what it takes to sell. I learned how to create a value proposition for people who likely saw none and how to get that value proposition across quickly and concisely. It has paid huge dividends as I go out and sell Team Rubicon’s concept, both for funds and for credibility.

If you were to start again, what would you do differently?

I’d find a way to pay myself sooner. I wasn’t able to dive in fully because I was constantly worried about putting food on the table–and my work suffered as a result. It took me a while to accept that it was okay to make money running a nonprofit, and the truth is, it has allowed me to pour myself even deeper into it.

What is the one thing you did/do as an entrepreneur that you would do over and over again and recommend everybody else do?

Accept that you don’t know everything and be willing to listen to people tear your idea apart. You have to have the humility to accept your own shortcomings.

Tell us a secret…

Team Rubicon is going to grow its veteran base 1,000% in 2012.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Veterans will soon be a force to be reckoned with in the entrepreneurial space. The sooner people recognize and harness that, the better off they’ll be.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

I’m reading Unbroken right now. It’s the true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic miler who joined the Army Air Force during WWII, was shot down, spent 2 months on a life raft and years in a Japanese POW camp. The lessons that can be gleaned from this book about human endurance and the capacity to carry on are priceless. Everyday you wake up, every single day is laughable compared to what Zamperini dealt with during that period.

If you weren’t working on Team Rubicon, what would you be doing?

I’d be launching one of the other business plans I’ve written in the last 2 years. No sneak peek at those though.

Who would you love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?

General Clifford Stanley (ret.), the outgoing Under Secretary of Defense and former Marine General. He refused to accept the Department of Defense and Pentagon for what they are–bloated, bureaucratic systems of sycophants. He chose to rock the boat and make tough decisions that had the potential to break up the system. I think it’s the spirit of the IdeaMensch community; people often talk about change, but General Stanley decided to create it.

What’s the toughest professional decision you’ve had to make?

I chose to drop out of UCLA’s Anderson MBA program to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams. It was tough at the time–I was developing relationships and certainly learning a lot–but ultimately I think it will be the smartest decision of my life. I learn by doing, not by reading; and the network I’ve developed traveling the world with TR has far surpassed what Anderson could have done for me.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I try to spend my Saturdays and Sundays in the fall watching the Wisconsin Badgers and Green Bay Packers play football. It’s truly the only time my mind can completely wander away from work and focus on something, much to the dismay of my girlfriend.

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After nearly five years in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, serving through five deployments in active war zones, former Sgt. Howard “Ford” Sypher stands ready to assemble an all-volunteer force to assist in domestic times of need.

Especially right here at home.

Sypher, who grew up in Lawrence and now attends Kansas University, told Douglas County Commissioners on Wednesday that veterans volunteering through Team Rubicon would be willing to handle tasks ranging from construction of homes through Habitat for Humanity to searching through rubble for survivors of tornadoes, fires, earthquakes or anything else.

As Veterans Day approaches, he said, the call to civic duty remains strong among highly-skilled troops returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and all corners of the world.

“This group of veterans is not interested in having a beer in a pool hall and sharing political discourse,” said Sypher, director of a Team Rubicon region that covers Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska. “They want to do something. They want to get to serving.”

Commissioners welcomed Sypher’s can-do attitude and encouraged him to meet with leaders of area law-enforcement and emergency-response agencies to determine just how Team Rubicon’s veterans could be especially effective during disaster situations.

Douglas County Undersherriff Steve Hornberger agreed with Sypher that highly trained personnel with specific skills could prove particularly helpful during the first 24, 48 or 72 hours of a disaster.

“When something happens,” Hornberger said, “you never seem to have enough people.”

Team Rubicon — named after a stream at the edge of ancient Rome, one crossed by Caesar and considered the “point of no return” — is a national organization that previously has been focused on sending disaster-response teams into sites of major disasters, such as tornado-stricken areas of Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Joplin, Mo.; one of the organization’s co-founders is William McNulty, a KU graduate and former Marine.

The regional approach — the regional office opens Nov. 21 in Kansas City, Mo. — is intended to focus veterans’ volunteer efforts even closer to home, with duties expanding into general volunteer work. That way, Sypher said, participating veterans stay active, use their skills and help the community at the same time.

The involvement helps veterans reconnect with their communities.

“We have volunteer resources to help,” Sypher said, “and it helps us.”

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In honor of Veterans Day, here’s a much-needed story about the courage, goodwill and valuable skills that our veterans have to offer our society.

Those of us on the outside might guess that most vets would be happy to complete their tours of duty and return home. Team Rubicon has discovered that this is not always the case. In fact, the international disaster relief veteran services organization has found many former US military personnel who are eager to continue going on missions in service of humanity — and therefore provide an untapped goldmine of expert volunteers for aid missions.

Jake Wood and William McNulty, both honorably-discharged Marines, founded Team Rubicon two years ago after self-deploying to Haiti to assist with earthquake relief. This experience revealed to them that veterans have both superior training and real-world experience with crisis management, leadership, and problem solving–skills that prove extremely valuable in disaster zones. Their intention was to create a non-profit that “bridges the gap,” often a week in duration, between when a crisis occurs and humanitarian aid organizations begin to arrive en masse.

Furthermore, the founders saw Team Rubicon as a way to help vets by offering them additional training and, most importantly, a chance to continue feeling worthwhile while coming to the aid of people in need.

I had the opportunity to speak with Joshua Maverick Webster, Team Rubicon’s Director of Personnel and Readiness, in Los Angeles, where he currently lives. I was impressed by his relaxed self-confidence and eloquent, heartfelt ability to speak to veterans’ issues.

Born and raised in Long Beach, Joshua joined the Army at age 19. It was 1999: Bill Clinton was president and the nation was at peace. After scoring well on his entrance exam, Josh volunteered to be an Airborne Ranger. He spent the next two and a half years in training, graduating from Ranger School, remarkably, on September 11, 2001. He deployed twice with the Rangers and was honorably discharged.

Afterwards Joshua switched services and completed the training to become an elite Air Force Pararescueman, or “PJ”. He also studied to be a paramedic; deployed to Afghanistan two more times; and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in history from UCLA. For the past year, he has been living off of money he’s saved in order to volunteer full-time for Team Rubicon.

Joshua sees real value in Team Rubicon’s model. The non-profit has deployed skilled veterans and medical professionals on a dozen international missions in the past two years, and all have met with success. In addition, they have harnessed veterans for several domestic aid programs, including disaster response to the tornadoes that hit Birmingham and Joplin, and flooding post-hurricane in Vermont. This Veterans Day, Team Rubicon is collaborating with Habitat for Humanity to repair homes of wounded vets across America.

Furthermore, Joshua greatly appreciates what Team Rubicon is doing for vets. “Veteran service is a big buzzword these days: 92% of vets say that they want to be involved in service to their communities. Also, veteran unemployment is ridiculously high. We’ve been flooded with positive responses to our organization. Vets are signing up saying, ‘I’ll do anything — fill sandbags, chop wood, whatever you need. I just want to be involved in a mission and be around people who share similar experiences and have similar ideals.’”

Joshua’s particular focus at Team Rubicon is on skill building. He is creating a system whereby volunteers will receive training in responding to wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, or other disasters based on the regions where they live, as well as earn paramedic certificates. These volunteers will be well equipped to become firefighters, cops, or EMTs. Team Rubicon’s specialized disaster-response teams will making its volunteer force more employable, mission-focused, and ready for whatever happens in their areas.

I asked Joshua to share his feelings on being a veteran. He gave this deeply moving response: “When you’ve spent as much time in the military as I have, you learn that people have certain expectations. They expect you to be very conservative and Republican, to not be smart enough to have gone to college, to be poor and inarticulate, and to have PTSD and be unemployable.

“I end up explaining time and time again why none of that should apply by default to anyone in the military. If you make the mistake of stereotyping every military member, then you’ll be missing out on what he or she could teach you about life, about war, about victory, and about loss. We are a wonderfully unique and powerful generation, and we make up just 1% of the country’s population. Most of us have been deployed five to 15 times overseas, but we usually don’t ask for anything from anyone. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I don’t want you to assume that I’m screwed up. We are genuine people who have been working hard carrying the weight of this conflict on our backs for 10 years. People usually want to ask us questions about the war, and I welcome them, but let’s try to ask them as if you were talking to a friend and not a press secretary.

“Also, most of us are dedicated to a life of duty and service. That’s why Team Rubicon makes so much sense. It’s the closest people can come to doing their military jobs as civilians.”

I wondered how Joshua deals with fear and stress in chaotic situations. He laughed. “It’s easy. It’s just your job. You can either freak out or go back to your training and start thinking in a systematic way: stop the bleeding, check the breathing, stabilize circulation… When you’re in the thick of it, you don’t think about anything else. You’re just too damned busy to be afraid.”

Joshua’s grin grew wider. “I’m a big believer that most people are capable of acts of heroism, even if they think that they aren’t. Once you’re taught something and you know how to do it well, you need to just get out there and do it. Don’t sell yourself short.”

If you’d like to take action of behalf of our nation’s veterans on this Veterans Day, Joshua suggests that you please consider donating to Team Rubicon. Also, help spread the word about the organization to other vets. Getting involved in service after returning from active duty can help vets build job skills and find a renewed sense of purpose in their lives.

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FORT HOOD — By next summer, this sprawling Army post will be more crowded than it has been since U.S. soldiers began pouring into twin war zones a decade ago. With combat operations ending in Iraq and slowing in Afghanistan, times are changing at what has been the Army’s busiest deployment hub since 2001.

But while Fort Hood braces for the return of nearly 20,000 American soldiers, many of whom have served three, four or five tours overseas, Army leaders are struggling with the unprecedented task of reintegrating soldiers who have known nothing but war for the past decade.

That same challenge is faced by the entire nation as it seeks to celebrate its service members this week by marking Veterans Day. Experts warn that America is stumbling into uncharted waters as it deals with the return of hundreds of thousands of troops — the 1 percent of the nation that shouldered the load of America’s two longest wars.

There is no historical precedent for the cycle of deployments that marked the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In Vietnam, the vast majority of service members served a single, 12-month tour; in World Wars I and II, most troops were also deployed just once, remaining on active duty until the end of the conflict.

But over the past decade of war in the Middle East, soldiers deployed, returned home, then deployed again, a cycle of churn that Army psychiatrists knew was wreaking havoc on the psyche and families of many service members.

The toll however, has far outpaced initial estimates: More than 700,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have already shown up at Department of Veterans Affairs clinics and hospitals — and more than half of them have mental health conditions, according to the Austin-based group Veterans for Common Sense.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the wars — the need for longer time at home between deployments — still remains a goal, although longer “dwell times” are probably on the horizon.

At Fort Hood, the questions are how to make post-war Army training engaging enough for soldiers used to the real thing and how to motivate those war veterans to stay in the Army. “They have so much experience; we will need them down the road,” Fort Hood commander Lt. Gen. Donald Campbell Jr. said.

Fort Hood is also hoping to prevent the mental health problems that occurred in 2010, when the post’s population was similarly swelled by returning soldiers. That year, Fort Hood set a record with 22 suicides.

The challenges facing soldiers transitioning to the civilian world are well documented: Unemployment rates for young veterans continue to outpace those for their civilian counterparts, and veterans younger than 30 now make up nearly 9 percent of all homeless veterans.

But at the other end of the spectrum, a growing number of service members are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan infused with a desire to operate at the height of their abilities and be part of something bigger than themselves. According to one recent survey, 61 percent of veterans volunteer with local organizations within two years of returning home. Veterans are opening and operating a wave of enterprises aimed at helping fellow veterans and civilians, such as Team Rubicon, a nationwide nonprofit that has sent hundreds of veterans to help disaster victims in the aftermath of tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes since 2009.

Experts say reintegration means different things for different service members and that their future often depends on their experience in the war zone. But all come back changed in some way.

“We are at the beginning of a wave,” said Maxine Trent, a counselor and program manager at Scott & White’s Military Homefront Services in Temple, a grant-funded counseling program that has seen nearly 15,000 Fort Hood soldiers and their family members since 2008. “The work is just getting started. We need all hands on deck.”

‘Don’t throw in the towel’

The parking lot outside the Fort Hood auditorium is crowded with the cars and trucks of freshly returned soldiers, one with “I love you daddy” scrawled in white letters on a back window. Inside, a couple hundred soldiers with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment settle into another day of reintegration training. They will hear presentations about travel vouchers, hostile fire pay and taxes, as well as domestic violence, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide. It’s Friday, and they are antsy to go on their 3-day leave, their first since they returned from Iraq.

“Are y’all sleeping on me?” asks Mary Prater, with Fort Hood’s Family Advocacy Program. “You’re probably going through the honeymoon phase. I am here to tell you that after 90 days, stuff happens. But don’t throw in the towel.”

In coming months, thousands of soldiers will pass through Fort Hood’s reintegration training as they transition to American life.

Campbell, who took over at Fort Hood in the spring, is spearheading an effort to revamp the program. “We want to make sure that when they all come back, it’s not a check in a box, but a true reintegration process,” he said. “We want to make sure it’s designed for the future.”

Reintegration training has traditionally consisted of about two weeks of classroom instruction, as well as sessions for spouses and family members. In the months after homecoming, the Army also offers voluntary trainings, such as the Strong Bonds program for soldiers and their families, aimed at helping them readjust to home life after a deployment.

Some soldiers have long complained that the Army’s classroom reintegration training is too bureaucratic and uses a one-size-fits-all approach that simply repackages messages they’ve heard before. One soldier, writing last year in her popular blog Army Girl, Army Wife, blasted class sizes as too large and anonymous.

“A 35-year-old infantry major who has been deployed 4 times sees the world differently than an 18-year-old female finance clerk who just finished her 1st deployment,” the anonymous blogger wrote. “But the content does not vary because the training is designed for everyone regardless of rank and combat experience.”

Barbara Van Dahlen, founder of Give an Hour, which links civilian mental health providers with service members and their families for free counseling, agreed that more individualized training would be more effective, though more expensive. “It’s hard to engage people from all different places in their lives,” she said. “It makes it harder to share.”

Some presenters at Fort Hood make an effort to draw soldiers into discussions. Master Sgt. Stanley Dyches, giving a class titled “Battlemind,” took the stage, microphone in hand, and slowly stalked the rows of soldiers. “Anyone here angry?” he asked, as a few dozen hands shot into the air. “Anyone waking up at 2 a.m.? \u2026 Anyone sleeping with their weapons?”

Some soldiers snickered, but a few hands rose. “I have to have it next to me,” a soldier told Dyches. “Protection.”

Staff Sgt. David Thomas, 28, a nine-year Army veteran, said the reintegration training didn’t offer much that was new. “I think it will be helpful for the junior soldiers, but a lot is redundant for those who’ve been in for a few years.”

Experts also question the timing of reintegration training so soon after soldiers return.

“It’s a critical period of time, but are they receptive to it then?” Van Dahlen said. “They suck it up and want to get back into life, but when things fall apart a year down the road, would it be better to reach them then?”

But many soldiers have left the Army by that time, and too few of them seek help from the VA or continue with counseling if they do, experts say.

Retired Army Col. Charles Hoge, who directed the military’s research program on the mental health effects of the wars between 2002 and 2009, said understanding what combat veterans experience when they come home requires a deeper understanding of PTSD symptoms and how they relate to war. Nearly every PTSD symptom — hypervigilance, the shutting down of emotions and an exaggerated startle response — are essential survival skills in the combat zone, he said. But studies have shown that combat can cause physical, neurological changes in the brain.

“It’s about helping warriors understand how their bodies have physiologically changed because of combat and finding ways to dial down that reactivity,” said Hoge, author of the 2010 book “Once a Warrior Always a Warrior: Navigating the Transition from Combat to Home.” “It’s not a light switch, but they can learn how to dial those reactions down.”

And though most veterans don’t develop PTSD (studies estimate anywhere from 20 to 30 percent do), the 2.3 million service members who went to Iraq and Afghanistan are nonetheless transformed by their experiences, Hoge said. Unlike previous wars, the current wars lack a defined frontline, and even noncombat troops face roadside bombs and mortar attacks on their bases.

“They react differently after deployment,” he wrote. “There is a strength of character that is sharp and direct, but one that may at times make others feel uncomfortable. \u2026 Warriors are more independent, but this may make it difficult to tolerate authority at work.”

For any kind of large-scale integration of combat veterans to be successful, experts agree, civilian society must at least be aware of these changes.

‘Too few guys’

Staff Sgt. Marc Basuel, a 30-year-old father of two who has deployed to Iraq four times since 2003, learned the hard way that he and his family needed strategies to survive all his comings and goings. The Fort Hood soldier said his marriage almost didn’t survive his third homecoming, after the bloody 2007 surge.

“One day it triggered, and I exploded,” he said. “My wife said, ‘If you don’t seek help, we’ll be leaving you.’\u2009″

So Basuel — and his family — developed some techniques to make the transition easier, most based on improving communication. Before he returned home this summer, he and his wife exchanged cards.

“I wrote what I was expecting from her: to give me some time, to communicate with me,” Basuel said. “If I have a nightmare, come and hug me. And I let her know what she can expect from me: nightmares and distance. \u2026 It’s a feedback between me and my wife.”

And his wife sent him a list of things she and their children wanted to do with him when he returned, including a trip with family and friends to a cabin in San Antonio. Basuel went to the gathering at the cabin but ultimately had to cut it short and send everyone home.

“I apologized, but I wasn’t ready for that,” he said.

Basuel said the deployments that defined his 20s — they began in 2003, and he spent four of the next eight years at war — took a toll.

“The main issue for soldiers is they only have a couple of months to reconnect, and then they have to gear up for the next deployment,” Hoge said. “The expectation that the physiological conditions of deployment will reset is sometimes a little unrealistic.”

The Army’s own studies have shown that even more important to service members’ mental health than how much time they spend at war is how long they have between deployments. According to the Army Mental Health Advisory team, which has signaled the need for longer dwell times since 2007, troops need at least two years and optimally three years of rest for behavioral problems to return to pre-deployment levels.

But the vast majority of soldiers got just one year between deployments, a mental whiplash that is unprecedented in modern warfare and has contributed to the psychological fallout that has so defined the conflicts.

Trent of Scott & White has treated soldiers who have done as many as nine deployments. She said that when pre-deployment training is included, many Fort Hood soldiers have only had about six months of down time — not nearly enough to undo the rewiring of a soldier’s neurobiology that occurs during a year at war.

“We’ve never asked the human body and human brain to go to a constant state of war for 10 years,” Trent said. “It’s inhumane and unbelievable.”

Longer dwell times among British troops have been credited with their lower rates of PTSD. British troops stay at home for at least twice the time that they are deployed, and they generally serve shorter deployments, something political decisions made impossible for American troops.

“It’s a function of too much war and too few guys,” said Adrian Lewis, a military historian at the University of Kansas.

American troops have paid a heavy price: Multiple deployments are associated with higher rates of PTSD and failed marriages, according to military studies. More than 600,000 recent veterans have filed disability claims with the VA, which sees nearly 10,000 veterans file new claims every month, according to Veterans for Common Sense, citing information it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Only now are manpower needs easing. Service members will leave Iraq by the end of this year, and troop reductions in Afghanistan are scheduled to accelerate through 2013. The Army has declared that beginning next year, most deployments will be reduced from one year to nine months. While that would imply longer periods between deployments, no fixed dwell times have been ordered. Army leaders are hopeful that dwell times will soon be stretched to two years.

‘What do we do for them?’

Soldiers who have deployed often describe the experience as moments of extreme intensity punctuated by passages of deep boredom — a pattern difficult to emulate not only in civilian life, but on a military installation.

“Some people come back and step into jobs that are not nearly as demanding or intense, with no adrenaline rush,” Van Dahlen said. “What do we do for them?”

A growing number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are beginning to harness that energy in positive ways. In many cases, that has meant founding or joining organizations to help fellow veterans. Groups such as Vets4Vets have become important counseling resources, and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization has become an effective lobbying and advocacy group for young veterans.

Others are channeling that energy to disaster relief. After the 2009 earthquake in Haiti, a group of veterans formed Team Rubicon, which has sent veterans to tornado-ravaged areas of the Midwest, to Turkey after last month’s earthquake and to Burma to train health care workers. The idea behind the nonprofit is that the skills that veterans learned at war — emergency medicine, teamwork and leadership — could be used in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Matt Pelak, 33, said Team Rubicon has provided him an outlet for the skills and drive he developed while at war. Pelak was a paramedic in New York before he deployed to Iraq in 2004 with the New York National Guard. For a year, Pelak served with a light infantry unit, going on raids, patrols and ambushes throughout the Sunni Triangle northwest of Baghdad. When he returned, he found his old paramedic job left him flat.

“I wasn’t the same person,” he said. “Being deployed, it gives you confidence. Certain situations, once you get through them, you realize, I am capable of doing a lot more than I expected. I see it with a lot of guys.”

So Pelak jumped at a chance to return to Iraq, this time as a well-paid contractor with the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service. “I kept wanting something else, so I went back again,” he said recently in Austin, where he spoke as part of a panel at the LBJ Library related to a Time magazine article highlighting the growing number of recent veterans doing public service. “You think the more you deploy, it will be enough, you will get it out of your system. But the more you go, the more you get it in your system.”

When he returned home in 2009, he got a job as a firefighter, and though he thought that job might fulfill him, he found himself still searching for something more. “I still had an itch to travel, all this energy in my head,” he said.

So Pelak joined Team Rubicon. “I hear from a lot of guys who say this is something they’ve been looking for since they got back,” he said. “A little bit of excitement and helping someone at the same time. They get to use the skills they’ve developed while deployed, dust off the cobwebs and feel like they are part of the team again.”

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New York Times, November 1, 2011, By James Dao

WHILE working with refugees and landmine survivors in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia in the 1990s, a Rhodes scholar named Eric Greitens had an epiphany about teenagers in traumatic circumstances: the ones who fared best were the ones who helped others.

Later, after he had served in the Navy Seals in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Greitens had conversations with wounded troops, and a similar refrain emerged. If they could not return to active duty, they wanted to find a way to serve their communities.

“They didn’t use the word ‘serve,’ ” he said. “They talked about becoming teachers, police officers, coaches. But serving is what they meant.”

So in 2007, after he got out of the Navy, Mr. Greitens and some friends used their combat and disability pay to start a nonprofit group called The Mission Continues. Its goal was not to give veterans emergency funds, social services or family vacations, like many other charities, but to engage them in public service — as a way of helping them heal.

“Too many wounded veterans end up spending all day watching television, self-medicating, playing video games,” Mr. Greitens, 37, said. “That’s when many make their worst decisions.”

The Mission Continues, which provides stipends for veterans to work at nonprofit organizations, is one of an array of nonprofit groups created by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to help other veterans return to civilian life by engaging them in civic service. (More will probably need such services as the combat mission in Iraq comes to an end and troops withdraw this year.)

They include organizations like Tempered Steel, which recruits wounded veterans to give public talks about their injuries — whether amputations, blindness, severe burns or post-traumatic stress — as a way of breaking down stigmas concerning the disabled.

Or Purple Heart Homes, a group founded by two friends who were injured in Iraq while serving with the Army National Guard that builds or rehabilitates homes for disabled combat veterans.

Or Team Rubicon, a network of veterans and health professionals who travel to communities — from Haiti to Pakistan to Joplin, Mo. — devastated by natural disasters to provide emergency services.

Psychologists and veterans advocates say there is a natural progression from military service to community or humanitarian work in the civilian world. Many troops enlist for idealistic reasons, wanting “to serve and protect.” And even those who do not share those reasons still learn how to work in tightly bonded units to reach a common cause — a basic skill for community service.

“Veterans believe in a team environment,” said William McNulty, a former Marine who helped found Team Rubicon. “They want to be part of a team bigger than themselves.”

A 2009 survey by Civic Enterprises, a consulting firm to nonprofits, concluded that younger veterans feel a hunger for continued service. The survey found that 90 percent agreed that helping in their communities was important to them, yet nearly 7 in 10 said they had not been contacted by institutions that do such work.

“Veterans are untapped natural assets,” the survey said. Many psychologists and therapists say community work and volunteerism can also be deeply therapeutic for wounded veterans.

Barbara Van Dahlen, a clinical psychologist who is the president and founder of Give an Hour, a nonprofit that provides free mental health care to troops, veterans and their families, said veterans overwhelmed by the wounds of war tended “to get caught up” in themselves.

“To get the chance to do for others can be incredibly helpful in terms of providing perspective and giving meaning in life,” she said.

Jennifer Crane, 28, was a Navy veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who became addicted to drugs and was homeless after leaving the Navy in 2003. Through Give an Hour, she started getting free therapy and improved so much that she e-mailed Ms. Van Dahlen to ask how she could help.

“Share your story,” Ms. Van Dahlen replied, and Ms. Crane became the group’s first representative giving talks about her experiences. Today she also volunteers for a social networking site for military families called Families of a Vet.

“It has been very therapeutic,” she said of the work. “When you live with it inside your head, it’s scary, it’s isolating, debilitating. But when you put it out there, someone will always say: you helped me today.”

The Mission Continues engages disabled veterans in public service by giving them $6,000 stipends to work in nonprofit organizations for seven months and no longer, to prevent them from viewing it as “permanent support,” Mr. Greitens said. Before they leave, they must develop “exit strategies” for postfellowship life.

A study by Washington University of the group’s first 52 fellows found that 7 in 10 continued their education after leaving the program and more than half volunteered at groups that provided social services or assisted veterans.

Amanda Heidenreiter was an Army captain who became a Mission Continues fellow after she was medically retired in 2009 for a range of disabilities, including traumatic brain injury caused by a mortar attack in Iraq and severe back problems from lifting sandbags.

During her fellowship, she worked with Paws for Purple Hearts, an organization that trains service dogs for disabled veterans. She found the work so fulfilling that she now volunteers as an outreach coordinator for the Mission Continues in the Washington area when she is not at her full-time job for an intelligence agency.

For Veterans Day, she is recruiting 50 veterans to help spruce up a public school in Baltimore. “When I’m the project leader, I’m in charge again,” she said. “I was afraid when I got out that I could not transition those skills.”

Jake Wood, a former Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, got the idea for Team Rubicon while watching images of devastation in Haiti after the quake last year. “I realized I could handle myself in Port-au-Prince and they would be short on help,” he recalled.

Now he and Mr. McNulty want to expand the group by opening offices across the United States and dispatching its 600 volunteers to respond to domestic disasters. Its first office is scheduled to open in Kansas City, Mo., on Veterans Day.

“We have no intention of being an employment agency,” Mr. Wood said. “We’re trying to empower veterans by improving their transition back into civilian life, first by continuing service, which is incredibly valuable to their mental health. But also by creating a community.”

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NEW YORK, Oct. 26, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — GQ’s The Gentlemen’s Fund, in partnership with Movado, is proud to announce Jake Wood, president of Team Rubicon, as winner of the 4th annual Better Men Better World Search. Each year, GQ accepts hundreds of nominations from across the country in its search for men who dedicate their time and energy for the betterment of society.

Wood, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, served four years in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq in 2007 and then to Afghanistan in 2008. He graduated at the top of his class from the Scout-Sniper Basic Course and was the recipient of the Jim Gulardi Award. Also, in 2007, he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with “V” for valor in the face of the enemy. After his tenure with the Marines came to an end, he quickly sprang into action following the devastation of the earthquake in Haiti. Within hours of posting a message on his Facebook page—”I’m going to Haiti. Who’s in?”—Team Rubicon’s first unit was formed with volunteer first responders, doctors, nurses, and combat vets. Thanks to social networking, the group accumulated $250,000 in medical supplies and donations. Wood’s military model has created a new set of standards for disaster relief, deploying rapidly to destinations in need of help. In fact, Team Rubicon most recently deployed a team to the areas devastated by the earthquake in Turkey, working with the Turkish Emergency Management System to provide their technical rescue skills.

In addition to Wood, four finalists were named in the Better Men Better World Search. Their charitable work, volunteerism, and community involvement embody what it truly means to be a gentleman:

Eric Greitens – Eric Greitens is the founder and CEO of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit organization that empowers wounded and disabled veterans to begin new lives as citizen leaders here at home. Greitens, a Navy Seal, donated his combat pay to found this organization after returning home from a deployment to Iraq in 2007. As CEO, he works to ensure that every returning veteran lives a life of purpose, regardless of what injuries they may have sustained during their time in the military.

Tim King – While attending law school at Georgetown University, Tim King taught at an inner-city school and, upon completing his degree, decided to pursue teaching as a full-time career. In 2006, he founded the nonprofit organization Urban Prep Academies, which operates a network of all-boys public high schools whose goal is to reverse the abysmal graduation and college-completion rates among boys in urban centers.

Deogratias “Deo” Niyizonkiza – This Burundian-American has spent the past several years working to improve the lives of local communities in his native Burundi, a nation recovering from a civil war. In 2007, “Deo” founded the Village Health Works community health center in Kigutu, near the borders of Congo and Tanzania—an area hit especially hard by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria—to provide high-quality health care, most of it at no cost, to thousands of patients since its doors opened.

Laren Poole – Back in 2003, Laren Poole traveled to Uganda for a filmmaking adventure, only to return with the ambition to expose the crisis at hand and help find a peaceful resolution to the decades-long war. Poole then co-founded the advocacy group Invisible Children, which, through documentary films and other media, seeks to transform apathy into activism by helping to tell the stories of East African children affected by Africa’s longest-running war—a war it is working to end.

Mr. Wood was chosen by popular vote and a panel of GQ judges and was officially announced as the winner by Willie Geist, host of MSNBC’s Way Too Early and co-host of Morning Joe, at the GQ Gentlemen’s Ball tonight in New York City. As winner of the 2011 Better Men Better World Search, Mr. Wood will be featured in GQ, receive a $2,000 cash prize, a Movado SE® Extreme watch, and $15,000 donated by Movado to his charity of choice

The remaining finalists also attended The Gentlemen’s Ball, as guests of Movado, and received a Movado BOLD™ watch and $3,750 donated to the charities of their choice.

To meet these inspirational men and learn about their causes, go to www.TheGentlemensFund.com and visit our Facebook page: http://on.fb.me/isvug1

THE GENTLEMEN’S FUND:

GQ’s The Gentlemen’s Fund initiative raises awareness for issues that are essential to modern men. Founded in 2007, The Gentlemen’s Fund encourages men to become agents of change by supporting charities that champion these causes. Recent Gentlemen’s Fund ambassadors have included David Arquette, Adrian Grenier, Josh Duhamel, Jimmy Fallon, Ashton Kutcher, John Legend, Steve Nash, Mark Wahlberg, Forest Whitaker, and Timbaland.

GQ:

GQ is the leading men’s general-interest magazine, with a monthly readership of 6.6 million readers. It is available in print, online at GQ.com, and as an app at iTunes.com and is available for purchase at BarnesandNoble.com and on Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The magazine is published by Conde Nast, a division of Advance Publications. Conde Nast operates in twenty-five countries and is the world leader in exceptional content creation.

SOURCE GQ

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