Getting Veterans Back to Work: New at Reason

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Eric Smith was a 17-year-old sailor. Over the next five and a half years, he was twice deployed to the Middle East as a Navy medic, serving as a corpsman for a platoon of Marines who found themselves in combat on multiple occasions. When he wasn’t deployed with the Marines, Smith led a four-man team responsible for a 20-bed intensive care unit.

Those years of hard-earned leadership and medical training under extreme conditions, Smith believed, would leave him well-prepared for a job in a civilian hospital when it came time to leave the Navy. “I was told I would be wanted in the civilian workforce because I had proven myself a reliable leader,” Smith recalled in 2011, after two years of struggling to find a full-time job. “That did not prove to be the case.”

About 200,000 people leave the United States military every year. Some separate after completing their terms of service, others are wounded or disabled, and still others are retiring. For the majority, a crucial part of the transition to civilian life is finding a job. Like Smith, many struggle not because they lack the needed skills but because they don’t have mandatory certifications or state-issued occupational licenses, some of which require years of redundant training in skills already provided by the military at taxpayers’ expense, writes Eric Boehm in the latest print edition of Reason.

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