John Baker, veteran

Family Safety: A Significant Concern for Returning Veterans and Their Families
Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, Cannon Caucus Room (CHOB 345)
October 24, 2008

Remarks submitted by John Baker, Veterans' Initiative Center and Research Institute and veteran

My name is John Baker and I am a retired Marine. I spent 22 years in the United States Marine Corp. I retired before this current conflict. Mr. Bowers, here, carries that mantle now of serving in the Marine Corp and I'm a little jealous of him that he can still serve. It was one of the hardest things I ever did was to get out of the Marine Corp. 22 years and I got to a point, well, I took care of my marines. After I retired I found a new way to take care of my marines and that was to go to law school, start a law firm for veterans, and I've also started the Veterans Initiative Center and Research Institute where - what we do with the "victory," as we call it in Minnesota - both of these are in Minnesota - is we have created a place for our next, what some folks are calling our "next greatest generation," and I would call Mr. Bowers our "next greatest generation of veterans" coming back from these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got some great leaders and that's one of the things I want to point out here. There's a lot of trauma and there's a lot of PTSD and family violence but what I want to stand out is that we have some very successful veterans coming back that are coming back and their hitting an economy where there's no jobs. A lot of what we need for these guys are jobs and career counseling and opportunity. In my opinion we've got these great leaders coming back from Iraq and I think they ought to be our next set of community leaders throughout our nation and that's what we're doing with the Veterans Initiative Center and Research Institute.

We've created a business incubator in Minnesota for veterans. We're creating a national model for this. And then we have the Research Institute where I have some folks doing some research and I'm going to talk about the poll that we conducted. Looking at some of the issues that are going on with veterans, and one of the big things about this is it's veterans doing this for veterans and I think that's a pretty big deal. We do have a different language that we speak and I think it's helpful when we can talk that language. I know with Marines, we especially have a little bit different language. I'll try to speak in full sentences so that you all will understand.

As I was flying in, I said I was from Minnesota, as I was flying in, I flew over Mt. Vernon, just happened to be reading the latest Legion Magazine and on the front of that is one of General Washington's, one of my favorite quotes of General Washington. It's, "The willingness of which our young people are willing to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars are treated and appreciated by our nation." Kind of appropriate.

We conducted a national poll and it's kind of what brought us here today. We, everybody knows about the Rand study and one third of our returning veterans have some PTSD, combat operation stress, depression, and TBI. There has been, what we've found is that there's no real study on what this is doing in their families. What effect this is having with reintegration and is there a prevalence of domestic violence? Now, this doesn't speak to all the resources that are out there. There are a lot of great resources for our veterans through the DOD, the VA, the VA has some great family resources. What we wanted to do is we wanted to ask the question whether those services are being delivered and whether they are making a difference. I think that's one of the reasons that we did this and that we came here today.

You know the other thing we wanted to look at is - is there access gaps and quality gaps? Our survey, we put it together pretty quickly and we put it on the internet with a little advertising. It was out on the internet for almost a month and we had 248 responses from that.

Two big organizations, IAVA and VFF, put it on their websites. That's for freedom and Todd's organization, IAVA that does a lot of work for veterans - which I think might be kind of unique. I think it's the first time that IAVA and VFF have done anything together, whether they know that or not. Other than happy hours Todd says. I think that's interesting. VFF and IAVA have different perspectives of what they're doing to support war and to support veterans, that type of thing. So I think it's an interesting collaboration on that. So what we did, we did a poll with 27 questions, 10 of those questions were demographic. We asked gender, age, ethnicity, marital status, children, branch and service status and whether they were an enlisted officer. By the way, you have the analysis in your packets. I'm not going to recite all of that in there. We had four deployment specific type questions...