11/11/22 Veterans Day Discounts

My son pointed out to me that his favorite pizza place has an offer.

We disagree on how much we like the pizza. Nevertheless he has made clear his intentions on where to go to lunch tomorrow...

themilitarywallet.com

Little Caesars 2022 Veterans Day Military Discount

If you think pizza may hit the spot this Veterans Day 2022, give Little Caesars a try. You’ll get a free, simple lunch and quick service.
themilitarywallet.com themilitarywallet.com
 
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So many of the most helpful SAF regulars are true blue veterans. To them: Thank you for sharing your amazing knowledge and experience. You’re an inspiration for applicants — and a source of comfort for parents of applicants (such as myself).

These veterans show that there are many ways to serve, and that one can continue serving long after they shed the uniform. I hope my DD and DS follow your leads when they themselves become veterans. With much gratitude… 🤗
 
MidCakePa said:
So many of the most helpful SAF regulars are true blue veterans. To them: Thank you for sharing your amazing knowledge and experience. You’re an inspiration for applicants — and a source of comfort for parents of applicants (such as myself).

These veterans show that there are many ways to serve, and that one can continue serving long after they shed the uniform. I hope my DD and DS follow your leads when they themselves become veterans. With much gratitude… 🤗
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There is an entire veteran community out there waiting for these incoming cadets and midshipmen to take their turn in reaching a hand back to help those who follow, some years down the road. By then, I’ll probably be retired to posting exclusively on the Bacon, Cocktail and Pet threads, which will be my diminished boundaries.

I appreciate your words. I work 100% in the vet world now, my third career, about half as a contract consultant for military career transition and half volunteer on board work for mil-vet non-profits.

Just for fun, go explore these on LinkedIn and websites, to see the breadth and depth of community out there:
American Corporate Partners
Veterati
Vets2Industry
Service Academy Career Conference
Corporate Gray
Military MoJo
Hiring Our Heroes
HireMilitary
AcademyWomen
The Mission Continues
Team Red, White and Blue
Team Rubicon
Student Veterans Assn
college alumni veteran groups
Service to School (CEO Christine Schwartz is a VT grad and former Army officer)


Those are just some of the groups, companies and organizations out there - there are organizations for services, education support, homeless, support animal programs, organized sports for disabled vets, equine therapy, and so many more.
 
A group of us Navy vets are getting together for a sea story marathon with cigars and beer (but I am a whiskey guy myself).

Most of the stories will be exaggerated or outright fabricated. But that has never stood in the way of spinning a yarn. 😎

Happy Vets Day from this old Mustang.
 
Teaching at our flagship state university, I regularly have veterans in my classes. (I also have some who are on active duty, as the school has one of the largest MECEP contingents in the country.) These students stand out for their discipline, inquisitiveness and engagement. They don’t always get the best grades, but they leave a very positive impression.
 
Capt MJ said:
There is an entire veteran community out there waiting for these incoming cadets and midshipmen to take their turn in reaching a hand back to help those who follow, some years down the road. By then, I’ll probably be retired to posting exclusively on the Bacon, Cocktail and Pet threads, which will be my diminished boundaries.

I appreciate your words. I work 100% in the vet world now, my third career, about half as a contract consultant for military career transition and half volunteer on board work for mil-vet non-profits.

Just for fun, go explore these on LinkedIn and websites, to see the breadth and depth of community out there:
American Corporate Partners
Veterati
Vets2Industry
Service Academy Career Conference
Corporate Gray
Military MoJo
Hiring Our Heroes
HireMilitary
AcademyWomen
The Mission Continues
Team Red, White and Blue
Team Rubicon
Student Veterans Assn
college alumni veteran groups
Service to School (CEO Christine Schwartz is a VT grad and former Army officer)


Those are just some of the groups, companies and organizations out there - there are organizations for services, education support, homeless, support animal programs, organized sports for disabled vets, equine therapy, and so many more.
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I'm fortunate to be on a couple of national committees as well as holding a state office in a veterans organization and get to see some of the tremendous things that a wide variety of the groups mentioned as well as other groups have and continue to accomplish. for instance, a Legion post in my state was destroyed by a hurricane some years ago and the members raised money enough to rebuild it PLUS add 6 apartments for homeless vets. Now, a few years later, they are raising funds to add 18 more units and three or four other posts are in the middle of adding homeless vet living spaces as part of their own upgrade/rebuilds. There is an active statewide committee helping to develop even more of this sort of facility and big name donors are helping move it forward. There are plenty of things that we could do better but there are also things that are wonderful. I'll include Boys State to that list.
 
From today’s WSJ. Unfortunately, it didn’t copy over well. I posted it on this thread as a reminder that Veteran discounts are not like other discounts, like being able to order off the Senior menu at Denny’s.

Here is the Link if you can get through the paywall.

www.wsj.com

Essay | Life After War: The Men of Bravo Company

For four veterans of Bravo Company, fighting as paratroopers in Afghanistan left visible and invisible wounds. Their experiences show that the stories of America’s veterans are still being written.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com

Sergeant Alex Jauregui doesn’t have any legs, but in a way that makes things easy for him. Deployed to Afghanistan more than a decade ago with Bravo Company in the 2-508 Parachute Infantry Regiment, everyone can see he’s been in combat and paid a price, with two prosthetics to show for it. Veteran groups have happily supported him in launching his business, and in turn they get to use his photo in their brochures. It’s a good deal for everyone.Other veterans have wounds invisible to those around them or even to themselves. The men of Bravo Company have spent years reckoning with their harrowing experiences, offering a snapshot of what hundreds of thousands of veterans experienced over the course of America’s 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
Sgt. J, as he’s known to his Army buddies, was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1985 and came to the U.S. illegally with his parents when he was a child. He and his family were able to stay in the U.S. under immigration policy at the time, and when he grew up he wanted to serve his adopted country. He chose the Army as a career after he graduated high school in 2003. “My friends had joined, and seeing the pride friends had when they came back in uniform made me really want to join,” Sgt. J said.
His first deployment was to Iraq in 2004 as a mechanic, but after a scrap with insurgents on his next deployment, he decided to become an infantryman. In 2009 he became a sergeant and was deployed to Afghanistan with Bravo Company, but firefights with the Taliban were rare. Instead the unit patrolled the undergrowth and orchards of the Arghandab valley in the southern province of Kandahar, trying to avoid IEDs, every step a horror of uncertainty.
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Soldiers of Bravo Company patrol with Afghan soldiers in Kandahar province, August 2010.PHOTO: YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The men used dark humor to cope. “At first we said, ‘If I lose a limb let me bleed out,’” Sgt. J remembers. They were unable to fathom living without a leg. But as more and more men lost legs to booby traps, their attitude shifted: “We changed to saying, ‘If I lose two limbs, let me bleed out.’”
Sgt. J made it through that deployment, but when he returned to the Arghandab in 2012, he stepped on an IED while on patrol. As soon as he regained consciousness he knew he was going to survive; he’d seen so many other men lose limbs that he trusted the Army medical system to fly him out and save him. Which it did.
“I’m not mad at anybody,” Sgt. J told me recently. “Not even the Taliban. They were just doing their job.” That’s how he describes it: matter-of-factly and without rancor. It was a day when the Taliban did a better job than the U.S. Army. Both legs gone, just like that.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he recovered and learned to walk again, “There were a lot of guys who were disgruntled or pissed off,” Sgt. J said. “You either accept it right away or you try to find someone to blame.” Sure, he misses his legs—who wouldn’t? But what he really misses is the Army, those bonds of brotherhood he found while in uniform. That was the best job he could ever have wished for: to hang out with his buddies all day and jump out of airplanes.
“It’s the hardships, the training and going through the hard stuff together,” he said, wistfully. “You don’t do that kind of stuff in everyday life, you can’t replace it.”
Sgt. J’s prosthetics might make it look like he’s been broken, but he knows his experience contributed to what he is today: a successful beekeeper in California, a loving husband and an attentive father. Without that IED, who knows if he would have the life he has now, which is pretty damn good. He’s alive and healthy, and although he doesn’t collect Air Jordan sneakers like he once did, he’s content.
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Tyler Koller served with Bravo Company, 2-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and deployed to Afghanistan in 2009-10. Raised in a religious family, he feels more comfortable now around other veterans than he does in church.
Rudy “Doc” Ponce, 33, was a medic on the 2009-10 Bravo Company deployment. The stress of that deployment outweighs anything he’s faced in the civilian world. He’s a crane operator now, and when there’s a problem at work he can be calm in a way he says his co-workers don’t comprehend. “You sound like you don’t care,” they’ll say to him as he works through an issue far simpler than keeping a fellow soldier alive on the battlefield.
Trent Logan, 37, got out of the Army in 2017. The transition has been easier for him than for some. “It was never hard for me to be proud of my service,” he said. “I was always doing it all for someone else, whether it was my dad or my wife. And I always had something to look forward to.”
Chase Jarvis, 36, went to EMT school when he was in the Army, and now he’s a paramedic. “It’s right where I need to be,” he says. He regrets getting out of the Army, and at the same time he’s glad he did, the same way so many others feel about their time in service. “People look back on it with nostalgia eyes,” he says. “But you have to remember there was a reason you got out.”




***​

Sgt. J misses the Army, but he’s gotten over it. Tyler Koller just can’t find a way to do that. Raised in a conservative Christian home in downstate Illinois, he was a Royal Ranger as a kid, part of a group that made the Boy Scouts look like ne’er-do-wells. Koller joined the Army at the age of 18, and his first deployment was with Bravo Company, along with Sgt. J.
In his Army days, the fire in Koller’s belly was stoked by belief in his mission and faith in a just and loving God. He’d gather his squad to say a prayer before they stepped out of the wire to go on patrol, and he wouldn’t ever say a cuss word, even though his fellow troops used to offer him money to say the F-word out loud. “No way,” he’d say. It would be an affront to the Lord and to his mother, who raised him in the Pentecostal church.
Koller wasn’t physically broken in Afghanistan, but something did happen to him. Like many men and women who went to Iraq and Afghanistan over 20 years of war, he suffered a moral injury. A soldier heads to a war zone with a carefully tuned moral compass that parents and preachers and teachers and friends have helped to calibrate.
But in a combat zone, soldiers see, hear and do things that aren’t aligned with the true north of that moral compass. Koller saw horrible things in Afghanistan: the killing of American and Taliban soldiers but also the inadvertent maiming of children. He learned of bacha bazi, a slang term for the sexual abuse of young boys by corrupt Afghan policemen.
“The faith that I had went away,” Koller said, though “I have hope in my heart that there’s a higher being out there.”
He decided to leave the Army in 2011 after his enlistment was up, but years later he regrets the decision. Even though he saw bad things in Afghanistan, he was one of the good guys trying to do something about it, though it was a Quixotic task sometimes. He and his buddies had a mission in life.
That all went away once he chose to leave the service, and for years he bumped from job to job without finding a true purpose. “My army experience was the highlight of my life so far,” he told me last year. “I knew I was making a difference, had a purpose. Since I got out, I don’t feel like I did anything.”
Donald McAlister, known as Mac, was the senior noncommissioned officer in Bravo Company during their Afghanistan deployment in 2009-10. A self-described “podunk dude” from Ponchatoula, La., Mac had a rough road in high school, getting expelled at one point for smashing mailboxes. But as a kid he saw the movie “The Longest Day,” with Henry Fonda and John Wayne as paratroopers, and that sealed the deal for him: He had to finish high school so he could join the Army.
Mac was too much of a hard-ass to have any friends in Bravo Company. He had been blown up by an IED on a previous deployment and nearly lost an eye, and he knew it was his job to keep such things from happening to his men. There was no time for pity or sympathy for anyone. And that’s the way Mac remained for years after the deployment.
Many combat veterans can’t find solace in their own hearts because they refuse to give solace to others. They want to one-up the next guy with tales of their own trauma. Mac was that way, but when he got ready to retire from the Army in 2017, he came to the realization that this approach wasn’t helping anyone, least of all himself.
“I went to see a mental-health professional saying, ‘There ain’t **** wrong
with me, I’m just stressed out because I’m retiring,’” he remembered. “Then I start bawling my eyes out. I truly didn’t realize the anger and pain and guilt that I had locked away.”
Today, Mac speaks publicly about how people who were leaders in the Army—NCOs and officers—can’t walk away from their obligations once they take off the uniform. The one-time hard-ass has become an unlikely ally for anyone fighting demons, no matter what those demons might be. “I’m f—ed up, too,” Mac told me recently, and that candor is his welcoming embrace for fellow veterans. Men in Bravo Company who might have hated him when they were in Afghanistan more than a decade ago have found a friend and an ally in Mac.
***

Jared Lemon is one of those who have found an ally in Mac. He grew up in Alaska, near Anchorage, where he learned to hike and shoot and fish. He was an Eagle Scout, and when he got old enough he became a soldier in the 82nd Airborne. In 2009, Lemon made his second deployment to Afghanistan as part of Bravo Company, expecting to go into combat. “I don’t think you hope for it, but you’re ready for it,” he said.
In April 2010, Lemon lost his arm to an IED. His buddy was trying to climb over a mud wall and gave Lemon his light machine gun to hold; he was holding it with his arm fully extended when the bomb detonated, killing his friend and mangling Lemon’s arm. He was evacuated by helicopter, and Army surgeons tried to save the arm, but they told him it would be pretty crappy even if they succeeded, so he said to take it off. He was left with just a stump.
“You can’t just look at someone who’s missing an arm and say they’re not f—ed up,” Lemon said. Sometimes you might forget you’re talking to a guy with prosthetic legs, but one with a missing arm always has that stump waving around, a constant reminder to everyone of what he’s been through.
After completing his physical recovery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Lemon bumped along with no path and no goal. Then he got involved with a veteran group called Ranger Road that helps men and women get out and do things—set goals, find a reason for being here. He climbed a mountain alongside some Special Forces guys and realized that if climbing a mountain with all your limbs is a big deal, it’s even bigger when you’re one short.
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Veterans of Bravo Company line up for physical training during their 2019 retreat.PHOTO: TRAVIS DOVE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

One of those guys asked him what he was going to do now. “You might be lost, but start moving and you’ll find yourself going in a direction,” he said. So in 2017, seven years after leaving the Army, Lemon enrolled in community college, starting with computer science classes; soon he transferred to the University of California, Riverside. He also decided to set himself the goal of running a marathon. He began to contact his Bravo Company brethren, trying to cajole them to run it with him in 2023.
His feeling is that if he talks enough people into doing it, then neither he nor anyone else can back out. If they all have to rely on each other, then they’ll get it done. “The older you get, the more you realize your life isn’t yours,” Lemon told me recently.
***
Soldiers who died have Memorial Day as their remembrance, but Veterans Day is for those who are still here. Their legacies aren’t in museums but in their everyday lives. Veterans want to be heard because telling their stories keeps their service alive, giving meaning and a renewed presence to their experience.
Veterans also have stories yet to unfold. The military was just one part of their lives. If they served honorably, they might still tarnish themselves; if they have yet to find honor, they can still do so. The men of Bravo show how much potential can be found in a single Army company.
 
There are times when reflexively declaring “Thank you for your service” seems so banal and trite.

“Thank you for your sacrifice” seems heavier but perhaps more apt. Even someone who is physically whole has sacrificed more than we can know. Their families have too.

Perhaps a genuine and heartfelt “thank you” — short and simple — while looking at them squarely in the eyes is best.
 
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I admit, idk WHAT to say. HOW to express my heartfelt gratitude. Honestly, there really aren’t words to express what’s in my heart. But I feel it deeply. Grateful comes to mind.

I was listening to a Veteran being interviewed on this topic. The interviewer asked ‘what is appropriate’ to say? And he responded that many just want to share their stories. About their lives. Their travels. That’s awesome, but how do you get to that level of convo with someone you don’t know? But I also want all of them to know how grateful I am.

One thing I did personally, was sign up for a veteran owned business subscription service. And did some Xmas shopping from Veteran businesses. I’m also committing to do that more throughout.

So, with gratitude, thanks to our forum Vets. Thankful yesterday, today, and everyday……
 
MidCakePa said:
There are times when reflexively declaring “Thank you for your service” seems so banal and trite.

“Thank you for your sacrifice” seems heavier but perhaps more apt. Even someone who is physically whole has sacrificed more than we can know. Their families have too.

Perhaps a genuine and heartfelt “thank you” — short and simple — while looking at them squarely in the eyes is best.
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Often in an airport terminal while changing planes, I've done a hand over heart gesture while looking a service member squarely in his/her eyes, and I've always received some type of affirming response ... a smile, a similar gesture in return, a thumbs up, a salute, a "GO-name the branch of service," etc.
 
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