Building a Home for the Brave: The Role of the Community in the Emotional Support and Successful Reintegration of OEF and OIF Veterans

Policy Problem Statement

Without a consistent and supportive group of family members, neighbors and peers, many returning Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) veterans in the Triangle Region, N.C. lack personal emotional support in the form of opportunities to express their emotions to a trusted group of people and avenues for advice. This is detrimental to the veteran attempting to overcome the challenges of transitioning to civilian life, especially that of overcoming psychological trauma and readjusting to a different lifestyle. For example, this issue has manifested as (1) substance abuse, “particularly alcohol abuse and dependence, when deployed service members returned from service in Iraq or Afghanistan”, according to the Institute of Medicine study (resource 3 in annotated bibliography), and (2) high suicide rates (resource 4).

As Sea of Goodwill (resource 1) acknowledged, there exists abundant resources and goodwill towards veterans among the wider community. The question is how do we harness them? But in order to address that question, we first need to identify why these resources are not utilized in the first place. First, where resources, such as veteran-organized peer support communities, are readily available, there exists imperfect information, that is, veterans are unaware of these opportunities for emotional support, according to the White Paper. Second, the civilian community lacks understanding and awareness on how they might be able to contribute to the emotional support of veterans. Third, there is also the lack of proactivity towards the issue among communities and organizations.