Caring for Our Injured Service Members

Official figures place the number of wounded and injured from Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom since 9/11 at over 11,000. Many of these are severely injured well beyond the conditions experienced in previous conflicts due to the rapid improvement in medical technology, battlefield triage, and body armor. I know many of you have been following the news stories and perhaps are even now assisting these newest disabled veterans on a day to day basis.

The face of today’s veteran is changing. Just a little over four years ago, discussion of a wounded or injured veteran elicited the image of a veteran reaching the end of their career or a homeless veteran standing on a street corner. Today, our assumptions are being shattered by stories in news print and televised media. These stories reveal young men and women, the majority of whom are little more than 20 years of age, with a level of experience and maturity that far surpasses their peers who have not served. These newly injured and disabled often have little or no education beyond high school, and stir in many of us the ghosts of our own past experiences. We are faced with a growing population of young men and women with young families, whose hopes and aspirations are now weighed down by the long and difficult paths ahead of them.

One year ago, our agency showed leadership in establishing a program to support the economic recovery and reemployment of newly transitioning wounded and injured service members and their families. We broke the mold by demanding early intervention and by identifying barriers to employment or reemployment prior to discharge while finding ways to address those needs before the point of crisis. We call this program Recovery & Employment Assistance Lifelines or REALifelines. REALifelines is for the first time making it possible for you and for your local One Stop offices to be apprised of the employment needs and goals of these wounded and injured service members before they return home to your communities. This is a new program, but one that is growing rapidly with strong ties to efforts underway at the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs.

I recently visited one of our REALifelines soldiers in his hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. Sergeant Alfred Kalous lost part of his leg while serving in Iraq. During his lengthy recovery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the DVOP placed there by the DC Department of Employment Security enrolled him into the REALifelines program. During his initial interview we asked him the question, “If you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?”

He responded by stating that, although he was an electrician by military trade, he had always wanted to be an auto mechanic. This information was relayed to the workforce center in Manhattan, KS and before Al returned home the local DVOP found him a job as a mechanic’s apprentice for Lear Seigler; but, he needed tools to go to work.

MACTOOLS is one of a number of companies who have contacted the HireVetsFirst campaign to enroll as a Veteran Friendly employer. If you haven’t visited and begun to refer employers and veterans to HireVetsFirst.gov I encourage you to begin to use this helpful resource. When the executives at MACTOOLS learned of Alfred’s need, they gifted Sergeant Kalous with a full master mechanic set of tools, which will not only ensure his employment today, but assure his career for years to come.

I share this story as a brief introduction to a program that depends ultimately upon you for success. In the weeks to come we will be introducing new training elements to help you dust off your skills and to help prepare your local One Stop or Workforce Board for a new generation of veterans for whom priority service should mean exactly that.

The plan is simple.

Veterans’ representatives at military medical treatment facilities and at the Military Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center will reach out early to returning wounded and injured servicemembers and let them know how to get in touch with a person near their hometown who can help them. Their local One Stop will be the first point of referral.

To assure long term coordination and follow through, we are partnering with the newly established Military Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center that will act as a centralized point for national connectivity and resource referral. To support your work, as an integral part of the REALifelines operation, we have established the National Recovery and Employment Assistance Center, which is currently being run by the Job Accommodation Network (JAN) and can be reached by calling 1-866-WORKVET. This national center is your tool, to help answer employment and accommodation needs that may arise for returning veterans with disabilities.

Each referral through the REALifelines program will receive follow up on regularly scheduled intervals to make certain no one slips through the cracks.

To clarify, I want to give you two new toll-free numbers, and I hope that you will use them and refer veterans and employers to them.

The first is for our own REALifelines consultants who can help build individual plans, who will be your primary referral agent, and who are backed by a strong team of workplace and job accommodation specialists. This is your team as service providers and you can reach them during normal business hours at 1-866-WORK-VET.

The second number is for the Department of Defense’s new Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center, and their number is 1-888-774-1361. Their call center is open 24/7. Their purpose is to, “assist injured service members and their families with life-changing circumstances to achieve the highest level of functioning and quality of life for which they are capable if provided the necessary services and support.”

Their consultants will help direct injured service members and families to the resources they need in a wide variety of areas including, medical care and rehabilitation, individual, couple and family issues, personal mobility and functioning, home, transportation and workplace accommodations, education, training, and job placement, financial resources, activities of daily living, and quality of life.

Their care managers will coordinate services, provide consultation and support, and make home visits as required.

We cannot afford to leave any veteran or their families outside the wire. Our national security rests upon recruitment and retention – both of which are holding well despite increased mobilizations – Our Nation’s Economic Security rests upon a productive workforce – which veterans are – and it rests upon the work that you do every day. Thank you.