A militarized exoskeleton allows me to make inhuman, dreamlike leaps into the evening air. Nearing the apex of one of these balletic arcs, I aim a submachine gun, aglow with futuristic readouts, at oncoming hordes of shouting North Koreans, puncturing them into silence with ejaculatory spurts of ammunition. A motion-captured Kevin Spacey, dead-carp eyed, occasionally appears in the corner of my helmets heads-up display to yell at me with the full force of his theater training. This is Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the bestselling console game of 2014 and the next installment in a gaming franchise that just so happens to be a point of conception for a real-life charity organization with a stated purpose of helping out American veterans. Its called, appropriately, the Call of Duty Endowment, and its mission is to place unemployed veterans, of which there are a huge number in America, into meaningful employment. Instinctively skeptical of brand-name corporate philanthropy, I wanted to speak firsthand with someone who had actually, verifiably been helped by this organization.This led me to David Roth, a Marine, formerly part of an M1 Abrams tank crew. Roth enlisted in 1990 at age 19 and served his final combat tour in Iraq before retiring from the military in 2010. Stateside, Roth planned on staying at home with the kids as a house husband while his wife furthered her career as a wedding planner. Less than a year after retirement, Roth told me, I found out some unfortunate information which led us to no longer be married. Then I became a single father with three girls. I started looking for a job desperately. Roth told me he suffered from service-related PTSD, hearing loss, and it is suspected that I developed testicular cancer from traumatic injury from the time I was in combat. Initially, he went on, I was looking for security jobs because right before I got out I was a security manager dealing with top secret clearances and ensuring that people on the command had the proper documentssomething I really enjoyed doing. But an equivalent job didnt pan out in the civilian world. Then I just started looking for jobs I could support my family on and most of the places that I found wanted to start you out at a minimum wage of around $12 an hour, which is not going to support my family. Coming out of the military, he added, and really struggling to find a job that pays you what youre worth, is one of the contributing factors to 22 veteran suicides a day. Because you go completely unappreciated. I became a single father with three girls. I started looking for a job desperately. The Call of Duty Endowment is funded with heaping millions from Activision at the personal behest of CEO Bobby Kotick, in an effort to address this uniquely American problem. Now that the longest era of conflict in American history, manifested by the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has finally, maybe come to something like a stopping point, if not a resolution, the US is left with almost a million-man army of jobless vets. About three quarters of a million ex-service members are without work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Pentagon pays out almost a billion dollars yearly in unemployment compensation. Post 9/11 vets are hit the hardest, with unemployment rates of Gulf War II era veterans 81 percent more likely to be unemployed than their civilian peers. CODE functions by scouring through Americas thousands of nonprofits that purport to aid veteran unemployment, looking for the ones that are the most efficient dollars spent per veteran placed and guarding against the smiling villains that merely brandish the word veteran in hopes of obtaining sympathy donations. Its kind of a bewildering landscape, said Dan Goldenberg, CODEs executive director. There are over 43,000 nonprofits out there claiming to help veterans. Goldenberg, a Navy commander with over two decades of active and reserve service himself, thinks the actual number of unemployed vets may be even worse than the statistics show. I dont know if I trust the data, he told me. What we hear from our non-profits, hear from a high-quality study the USC just did, [is] that the pictures actually a lot worse. There is no shortage of people seeking help. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who founded CODE, echoed that sentiment. Veterans bring tremendous value to the workplace. Thats indisputable, he told me. Which is why a 16 percent unemployment rate among veterans ages 20 24 in the US is alarming and unacceptable. The Call of Duty Endowment has been very effective in finding jobs for veterans, however theres much more work that needs to be done, particularly in educating direct hiring managers of the many benefits of employing veterans. Veterans play CoD at CODE event. Photo: CODE Facebook page In 2013 Hire Heroes USA, a non-profit that has received roughly $1.5 million in CODE funding, sent an email to Roth. He was in such a bad situation at the time hes not even sure how they found him. Might have been something I applied to, he said. At the time I was unemployed and trying to find work. I was not medicated [for PTSD], so things are a bit blurry for me back in that time period. Hire Heroes helped transform Roths resume, interpreting his comprehensive skillset into terminology a civilian could wrap their brain around. Roth wound up with a job within weeks of Hire Heroes helping to rewrite his resume, demonstrating how simple the solution to this national tragedy can sometimes be. Roth now works as a recruiter at Tradesmen International. He was hired on Monday, November 2013. Veterans Day. As a recruiter, he puts special emphasis on bringing other vets on board. Explaining to me the issues job-seeking vets face coming out of the military, Goldenberg told me that employers tend to feel culturally alienated from vets who have spent years within an insular military culture. For their part, he said vets are frequently none too comfortable with the civilian workforce either. In particular, the failure to understand how vets military experience can be utilized in the civilian sector is a big barrier, even if it sounds like a relatively small hurdle. Often the veterans themselves do not know how to articulate their skills in a way civilians will pick up on. Communication breaks down. Goldenberg illustrated how this breakdown of empathy warped the job interview experience: I talked to an Air Force guy years ago who said, Yeah, they asked me how many people Id killed in a job interview. The military does have a mandatory Transition Assistance Program, or TAP, for all personnel leaving the services, meant to assist vets in their transition back to civilian life. Its a five-day workshop. TAP appears to be an altogether half-assed affair, and seems to be the broken crux, one of the critical leaks that if mended might at least help resolve the nations hemorrhaging of veterans into economic despair. When youre going through the Transition Assistance workshops, Roth said, they have these resume writing courses. But theyre worthless. Because they teach you the format, but then they go on to say, dont use military terms because civilians dont really know military terms. Thats all you know is military terms. You know nothing about the civilian workplace and lingo. That would be like me taking a civilian and saying Hey, write this resume to get in the military, but dont use civilian terms. Theres no chance of success at that.Goldenberg called TAP a mere start, a primer. Its sort of death by PowerPoint. Diette, at right. Photo: Carly Diette I spoke with Carly Diette about TAP. Diette joined the Navy in 2005 at age 17 with an ROTC scholarship to Vanderbilt University. Upon leaving the Navy in 2014, Diette had also been successfully helped with finding employment at Koroberi through CODEs funding of Hire Heroes. Like Roth, Hire Heroes helped her restate and rethink her resume and approach. A PowerPoints not going to do it When I suggested to Diette that the military might do more to transition service members into civilian life she said, I dont want to knock them too much, because they provided me with maybe the best experience of my life. But it was hard when we got out. They could prepare you a little more... A PowerPoints not going to do it though. During the resume-designated day of my TAP, they just said, Okay, just make sure you go home and write it. And, then, that was it. Diette says she was one of the lucky ones though, after she was left rudderless and suddenly a civilian after having been totally taken care of by the Navy. I have a support system of a husband, an education and saved money. If I didnt have any saved money or a support system it would have been, maybe, devastating. When I asked Rob Hard, an external affairs manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs, why it was necessary to rely on nonprofits, taking up the slack on this issue rather than the military itself, he told me that nonprofits were smaller, more local, sometimes with a particular focus better suited to an individual veterans needs. It takes a village, he said. If we all want to support the troops, we all need to take an active role. Hard went on to tell me of a veteran of his own family who is blind, and for that family member, engaging with a nonprofit that specializes in blindness is a better way to meet his spiritual, social, and medical needs than dealing with the monolithic VAs office. What helps that family member the most? Hanging out with other blind folks, Hard said. Goldenberg related something similar, alluding to the idea that veteran unemployment wasnt necessarily the militarys purview: The reason we pay for the military is to fight and win our wars, period, he said. I think the current effort could be improved, but ultimately the private sector and the nonprofits are the best at doing this [helping vets]. Hence CODE, a nonprofit created by Activision, purveyor of the evergreen Call of Duty series.To receive an initial $30,000 grant, given out under the rubric of the endowments Seal of Distinction award, each non-profit must open its books for a full audit, to verify efficacy. (The audit work is done pro-bono by Deloitte.) After being awarded the Seal of Distinction, the non-profit can then pitch CODE on ways they hope to expand to help even more vets, thereby enlarging their sphere of positive influence. Its a method CODE calls chapterization and many of the nonprofits ultimately receive hundreds of thousands or even over $1 million in funding. These organizations not only help with resumes, of course, but generally offer career coaching, mock interviews, sometimes even provide needed business suits, or whatever else might be needed.Since it began in 2009, CODE has been given $13 million by Activision, with every grant given out to a nonprofit by the Endowment personally approved by Kotick. Roth told me that Hire Heroes made offers on anything else I might need. But once I got this job, that solved any problems I had. I didnt really need to take up their time and their resources anymore because I was okay. Recent findings show that hiring veterans makes good business sense. Goldenberg put it this way in CODEs annual report: The message we want employers to internalize is not one of pity or patriotism, but rather the proven, tangible value of veterans in the workforce.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:49:30 +0000
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