Count the causes like a cadence

It seems as if they are everywhere. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans joining the numbers of other veterans across the country. You can always tell when a new veteran is in the room. They are looking around, feeling out of place until another veteran goes to greet them and then, then they know they belong again.

When they are active duty, regular military or citizen soldier, they are with other people they would lay down their life for and in return, they know the others would too. They have a shared sacrifice leaving behind families and friends, jobs all while wondering if today is their day to die. When they come home, that sense of belonging is gone. They assume they can just pick up where they left off with their families and friends but soon they realize they don't think the same way they did a year before. How can they? How can anyone they know understand anything about where they've been?

That is just part of their problem. Unemployment is high because most employers have no clue what these men and women are like. While they would make the best workers after proving they were so committed to their last job they were willing to die doing it, employers put their applications aside. They can't understand the veteran either.

Wounded servicemen and women have a harder time when they are unable to work and unable to have their claims approved so they can afford to live. Imagine that! Managing to live through bombs and bullets, every hardship yet discovering coming home is even harder to do. Suffering from wounds, by body or mind, they have to deal with the pain topped off by bills coming in the mail and wondering when they will be able to pay them. They wonder if they will ever be out of danger.

Here's a story of one of them wounded five times with three Purple Hearts!

Badly wounded Marine finds a new way to serve


BY MICHAEL DOYLE

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — Kurtis Foster knows the cost of wartime service.

"I was wounded a total of five times," Foster said, "but I only got three Purple Hearts."

Count the causes like a cadence: Grenade. Land mine. Homemade bomb.

First, the Oakhurst, Calif., resident took shrapnel to the neck. Then he got tossed from a truck when he and his fellow Marines drove over the land mine. Then, on Foster's third tour of Iraq, in 2007, an improvised explosive device concussed the bejesus out of him.

Foster recalls vomiting a lot. Other than that, his final combat injury is mostly a blur.

"I remember little things," Foster said, "but it's like little clips."

Two other injuries came and went, unheralded. The Marine Corps added it all up and counted Foster as 60 percent disabled. His knees are bad. Arthritis ages him, all over. He has a hard time getting to sleep, and a hard time waking up. Headaches harangue him. His memory is inconstant, and it's not always his friend.

Foster is 26, and now he's reporting again for duty.

On Friday, the Yosemite High School graduate and medically discharged Marine sergeant formally started work in Fresno, Calif., as a Wounded Warrior Fellow. The two-year congressional fellowship will support Foster's work as a veterans' casework specialist in the Fresno district office of Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif.

Established in 2008, the fellowship program provides annual salaries of roughly $40,000 to veterans who are at least 30 percent disabled, allowing them to work in House of Representatives members' district offices across the country. The fellowship also gives them a new start, doing work that hits home.

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