A civilian military depot in California is trying to plug soldier-reported gaps in U.S. supply lines literally on a shoestring budget — by providing bootlaces along with tourniquets, tracheotomy tools, goggles and other gear to service members in Afghanistan who say they are increasingly strapped for basic equipment.

But TroopsDirect, a nonprofit with one full-time employee and a small squadron of corporate backers, calls the latest request sent from soldiers soon to be in harm’s ways a disturbing first: They say they need key materials to protect them in a combat situation. 

An Army unit slated to deploy to Afghanistan to clear roadside bombs has asked TroopsDirect for 30 special vests designed to carry armored plates because, according to the unit’s commanding officer, the Army will only outfit half of his 60 members with those vests.

The reason: Defense Department budget constraints, the unit’s sergeant told Aaron Negherbon, president and founder of TroopsDirect.

“That’s just not going to work,” Negherbon said. “Thirty lives are at risk. If one of the guys died because of lack of equipment, who will then say anything about budget cuts? What’s the value of a human life or a human limb?

“A sergeant I spoke to, who is under the company commander in this unit, said there was a budget issue tied to this,” Negherbon added. “To that end, he said: ‘If this was a few years ago, we could have gotten anything that we wanted. Now, it’s a make-do kind of thing.’ The company commander even put in an additional appeal (with the Army) and never heard back on it. So they reached out to us.”

TroopsDirect shared with NBC News its communications with the unit member who requested the 30 vests. NBC News agreed not to reveal the unit’s location or name to protect its leaders from potential discipline for going outside the Army’s supply chain.

The vests eventually will be fitted with armored plates that are slipped into Velcro pouches inside the nylon fabric. The unit already possesses the necessary plates. But, without the vests, 30 of the men would have no way to cloak themselves in the armor, Negherbon said, unless they were to duct tape the plates to their uniforms or bodies. An order verification form, obtained by NBC News, shows that Darley Defense in Itasca, Ill., will ship the vests — at a total cost of $1706.89 — to the nonprofit’s headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., at the end of February.

“I fully support what Aaron and TroopsDirect are doing,” said Jeff Freeman, the Darley salesman who sold the vests. “What is strange is when these troops are deploying, they may not be deploying with enough gear to support them for their 6-month, 9-month or 14-month deployment. At some point, they then have to turn to TroopsDirect, or to (their branch’s) supply system, to fulfill those needs. I don't know if that’s a budget issue or a planning issue.”

NBC News contacted the Army's media relations division on Tuesday afternoon, seeking comment on the work being conducted by TroopsDirect. An Army spokesman had not responded to that interview request as of Wednesday morning.

Last year, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced his plan to cut almost $500 billion from the defense budget over the next 10 years, focusing on shrinking ground forces in the Army and Marine Corps.

With the U.S. military drawing down in Afghanistan — and with 34,000 more troops scheduled to return to home soil during the next year — the requests for needed gear have simultaneously picked up at TroopsDirect, according to Negherbon.

Last month, he heard from the commander of an Army mortar unit outside Kandahar, Afghanistan, who complained that the ear protection donned by his soldiers was so worn, some men were having their eardrums blown out by weapon percussions and were bleeding from their ears, Negherbon said. He’s pulled together an order of ear-protection devices for that unit.

When combat medics waited more than four weeks to be resupplied, TroopsDirect gathered stretchers, stethoscopes, syringes and gauze rolls in a few hours and shipped the material overseas. 

According to GuideStar, a charity-monitoring website, TroopsDirect reported $350,858 in income (contributions) in 2011 against $209,419 in expenses — including $27,466 spent on administrative costs. Its corporate contributors include Gatorade, PowerBar, REI, American Trucking Associations, Darley Defense and 18 other companies.

Founded in 2010, the nonprofit self-reports that 87 percent of its total organizational expenditures go directly to program expenses and that it already has shipped more 60,000 pounds of equipment to service members overseas.

“We’re seeing a lot more of this one-off kind of stuff — like vests — that once was available and now isn’t,” Negherbon said, adding that troops who reach out to him have reported that some of their equipment needs are budget related and some are caused by logistical glitches arising in the Afghanistan drawdown.

“I will hear things like: ‘We’re in the south and our supply chain is in the north and because they’ve closed down so many distribution facilities and are retrograding at a rapid rate, we can’t get anything anymore,’ " Negherbon said.

“I can see telling them to ‘make do’ without a certain type of pouch. But these things (like vests and ear-protection requests) are something I’m seeing a lot more of. We just sent a bunch of medic packs to a Marine Special Operations unit. They were issued stuff that was ineffective for a medic out in the dirt tending to the wounded.”

Freeman’s company began selling to TroopsDirect in April of 2012 and has done deals on helmet lights and gloves, he said. 

“There’s probably two sides to that story,” said Freeman, a veteran. “At times, the Army (members) may use him as an ‘easy button.’ If they know they’re going to have difficult time getting something out there, maybe they go to him because they’ve used him in the past and he’s provided such great customer service to them that it might be a little easier for them to use him.”

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Jessica Mcgowan / for NBC News

Former Marine Paul Menefee, an Iraq war veteran, makes music in his Union City, Ga bedroom, on Feb. 15. Since transitioning to civilian life, Menefee works as a music producer in Atlanta. At home, Menefee spends most of his time in this blacked out bedroom making music and relaxing. Drawing blinds and blacking out windows is a habit Menefee started after his military service to help him feel more secure.

In the first month home from war, one Marine routinely searched his darkened bedroom for the rifle he'd left in Iraq, while another Marine shunned his favorite nightspot for fear that someone in the club might carry a gun. 

In the four weeks after their homecomings, one infantryman drove “white knuckled” at 55 mph while another soldier purposely began living even faster — losing her virginity, going blonde and drinking hard with battle buddies.

Some 34,000 service members will ship home from Afghanistan during the next year, President Barack Obama told the nation last week. 

Amid the gleeful glow of arrivals, many of those troops may quickly confront sensory overloads, social awkwardness and, perhaps, deep cravings for personal freedoms, according to interviews with four younger veterans who weathered such moments.  

“The first 30 days are interesting,” said Alex Horton, who spent 15 months in Iraq as an Army infantryman, including during the 2007 troop surge in Baghdad and Diyala Province.

Today, he works for the Department of Veterans Affairs. "I’ll call it the unraveling. That first week back you’re still high on everything, kissing your wife or girlfriend, sometimes seeing your kids for the first time. But then the tension starts to build.

“You experience culture and weather shock, and notice your senses are heightened,” said Horton, adding that another common theme — albeit something he did not go through — involves disrupting the daily routines established by a spouse and kids during a service member’s absence, and consequently, dealing with strained relationships. 

Distant from family
To that point, two veterans interviewed for this story, including Horton, said they suffered romantic breakups after returning from combat, and two got divorced. 

Jessica Mcgowan / for NBC News

Former Marine Paul Menefee, an Iraq war veteran, shows off his spiritual tattoos at home in Union City, Ga., on Feb. 15. The "Blessed" tattoo is one many Menefee has gotten after his two tours in Iraq.

"Trying to get back to my regular life was hard because I wouldn’t talk much to anybody. I didn’t want to talk about what went on in Iraq, didn't want to describe the details," said Paul Menefee, a former Marine who was deployed twice to Iraq and fought in the Battle of Fallujah in late 2004. 

"Things that happened, I didn’t want to remember. I was trying to cope in my own way, not deal with the images in my head," added Menefee, who eventually divorced his wife. "I was distant from my wife, mother, cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. At Sunday dinners, I pretty much stayed off to myself."

Old habits came home, too. During his first 30 days back at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Menefee grew jittery in a Wal-Mart checkout line because other customers were queued up behind him. He left the store immediately. He avoided nightclub outings with friends because the bar crowds seemed unpredictable.

He chose seats in the backs of restaurants so he could watch all the patrons and map each exit. At home, he kept his blinds drawn, his door locked and always looked left then glanced right when passing a hallway or an open corner. 

On interstate highways, Menefee — a truck driver in Iraq — often pulled four lanes to his left if he spotted a blown tire or crumpled, food wrapper lying on the right shoulder: The types of hiding places in which insurgents routinely planted IEDs in Iraq. While driving in an American city, he would take an early left or an abrupt right if he saw garbage or roadkill on an approaching curb.

"You don’t realize that (your senses are) very fine-tuned to your environment, everything from hearing things to seeing things," Horton said. "I imagine this is what blind people feel with their other senses. You rely on them so much (in combat), they have no business being that acute in the civilian world."

"When I got into a car and drove on a highway for the first time," Horton added, "I was white knuckled."

For former Marine Christian Gutierrez, who returned from Iraq in spring 2008, the open road at first carried a mix of old caution and fresh freedom.

During quick trips to the grocery store, he frequently would exit his car then quickly circle back, thinking he'd left his rifle in the front seat, momentarily forgetting he didn't carry a weapon anymore. 

"But I love cars and love driving. So I drove a lot because it was my time," Gutierrez said. "That moment was your moment. You had control of your car. You had control of that moment."

'Lucky I didn't die'
Soon, he bought a motorcycle to further feed that rush of independence, to expand his new-found personal space — and because combat left him with another sharp bit of wisdom: Your moments on this planet may be few.  

"Being back taught me that if I want to do something, I’d better do something right now. You never know," he said. 

That same compulsion drove Iraq veteran Laura Cannon to use her first 30 days home to mark, she said, "the beginning of a new life for me," a time in which she stepped away from both Evangelical Christianity and the strict rules under which she'd been living since enrolling at West Point.  

"I knew that if I didn't make drastic changes, being at war would be the last adventure I would ever experience," said Cannon, a former Army infantry member who was part of the 2003 Coalition invasion. "Surviving a war completely changed my perspective. I needed to start living for me. So I made a mental list of goals to accomplish. No. 1 — lose my virginity. I was 24 for God's sake!"

During her first month home, Cannon also bought an SUV, broke up with a boyfriend, dyed her hair blonde, visited Ground Zero, posted a personal best in a 5K race, and found time to "party my ass off with my war buddies — heavy drinking."

In Iraq, "there was (stuff) blowing up everywhere. I'm lucky I didn't die. I hadn't done enough with my life," she said. "I had survived a war. I had a second chance to live differently. I was not going to let others control me anymore. It was time to make more adventures and maybe get some baggage along the way. I was so far behind. Lots to catch up on."

"The rapid pace at which I compensated for my repressed life, especially in the first 30 days after the war," Cannon added, "were completely catalyzed by combat." 

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Eighty percent of veterans who attempted suicide and survived had received mental health care one month earlier from the Department of Veterans Affairs, underscoring the potential peril of 50-day average wait times they face in trying to access VA treatment, a suicide expert told a Congressional committee Wednesday.

“When they had contact a month prior, the question I ask is: How long was it until their next (VA) appointment? Was it scheduled six weeks out? Is that the problem? Or was it scheduled one week out?” David Rudd, head of the National Center for Veteran Studies, testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“My concern is — from the individuals I talk with that we treat to surviving family members of those who have died — often times, it’s an issue of the (VA) system getting in the way to keep an appointment, to get an appointment, or to get to an appointment,” Rudd said. 

According to a VA report released earlier this month, 18 to 22 veterans commit suicide each day. And that rate “has remained steady” since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began 12 years ago, said Veterans' Committee chairman Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., who noted that during that same span the VA has increased its budget by 39 percent and its staffing by 41 percent.

“When a veteran is in need of care, the difference of a day or a week or a month can be the difference between life and death,” Miller said. “ ... Something somewhere is clearly missing.”

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Barack Obama announced that 34,000 U.S. troops would head home from Afghanistan during the next year.

Given that mammoth flow of young veterans into an already-backlogged VA system, Miller questioned whether the agency’s “one-size-fits all approach” will leave thousands of ex-service members mired in a bureaucracy that “fails to recognize that addressing mental-health needs ... is a task that the VA cannot handle by themselves.”

“We’ve improved our services for veterans but we know there’s a lot more work to be done,” testified Dr. Robert A. Petzel, the VA’s undersecretary for health.

In 2012, for example, the VA’s 24-hour crisis line fielded 193,000 phone calls that resulted in more than 6,400 “rescues” of veterans who were threatening to hurt themselves or their family members, Petzel said.

While the volume of calls to the hotline is increasing, fewer of those calls are “acute” — or people making an imminent threat — “demonstrating that VA’s early intervention appears to be working,” Petzel added.

What’s more, in the past year, VA has hired 1,058 new mental-health providers and the agency expects to meet its hiring goal of 1,600 extra clinicians by June, Petzel testified, adding that last year 1.3 million veterans received mental-health care from the VA, up from 927,000 in 2006. That increase, he contends, shows that “proactive screening” is working to find and treat veterans for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, substance abuse issues, and the effects of military sexual trauma.

“Your focus is on the process, the number of people hired. Numbers, numbers, numbers,” Miller responded. “The most important number is the number of veterans getting healthy, healthier or helped.”

“It’s time for us not to do the same thing,” Rudd agreed. “More of the same thing isn’t working ... The way we’ve (tried to address these problems) over the years since the start of these wars is we’ve made the VA larger. I think the evidence would suggest the VA does not need to be larger. I was not encouraged when I heard they’re hiring over 1,000 individuals.”

Instead, Rudd testified, VA should partner with the Department of Defense’s health system TRICARE “because their providers are already in those small communities and available."

“That means shifting money to a non-traditional model,” he added. “But that’s how you connect people to people” instead of linking individual veterans into a vast system.

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• Soldier Hard's hip-hop lyrics reveal PTSD's rough edges
• 22 veterans commit suicide each day: VA report
• Concern grows about military suicides spreading within families

Amid the ongoing exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, more service members are mulling a shift to the civilian work force and asking the key financial question: What will I miss if I walk away from my military pension?

The short answer: A lot.

Unlike private-sector jobs where employees become partially vested in their company’s pension no matter how long they’ve held their positions, service members pocket no pension payments if they exit the military before logging 20 years. (If they remain in the armed forces for 20 years or more, service members receive up to 50 percent of their base salary upon retirement).

“I think that question is being asked more often now because of unknowns on both sides – people wondering how the drawdown will affect them and, on the other side, those who are seeing a lot of instability in civilian job market,” said Kim Lankford, a writer for Kiplinger, the personal finance magazine, and author of "Kiplinger's Financial Field Manual," sent to military bases around the world. She also is married to a 17-year Army doctor.

According to U.S. military organizations that Lankford covers, 83 percent of service members “don’t make it to 20 years — which means that only 17 percent qualify for the pension,” she said. “There’s a lot to consider when deciding whether or not to stay.”

A corporation may be able to outbid the military when it comes to an ex-soldier’s new salary. But to truly calculate that wage rate, service members need to know what their sacrificing in taking that civilian paycheck, Lankford said.

For example, during their careers, thousands of military folks are temporarily stationed in locales without a state income tax, like Florida and Texas. Even when they later are transferred to bases where state taxes are levied, service members are allowed to retain their residency in the non-tax states. That perk ends with a military retirement.

When it comes to health care, military retirees (people who stay more than 20 years but not yet age 65) pay a small premium for Tricare Prime - currently $230 per year for individual coverage and $460 per year for families (and increasing to $269.28 per year for individuals and $538.56 per year for families after Oct. 1, 2012), according to Lankford. (Disabled service members get health care through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.) 

Compare that to the average civilian family pays about $15,073 a year for health coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The average individual pays about $5,429 annually. While employers generally foot 60 to 80 percent of that bill, workers pay for the rest.

“All those deductions add up,” Lankford said. Veterans who bid farewell to the military “are often very surprised to learn that civilian jobs in higher dollar amounts than military jobs can actually leave them less take-home pay.”

One other major decision for troops considering short military careers surrounds the G.I. Bill, which now pays for a veteran’s college costs at up to $17,500 per year. That benefit can be transferred to a service member’s children if he or she spends six years in the armed forces — and is willing to commit to another four-year stint, Lankford says.

Then there are the housing-cost breaks military members enjoy. (For those who live on base, housing is free). Service members who rent or own their own homes receive a tax-free housing allowance than can exceed $2,000 per month depending on their pay grade, their number of dependents and the city in which they live.

“If a service member is thinking about leaving,” Lankford said, “they should be sure to include the loss of that tax-free allowance when calculating their new civilian salary.”

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The highest number of U.S. Marines will exit Afghanistan in August compared to any other month in 2012 as a large exodus of American troops continues, U.S. Marine Corps Maj. General David Berger said today in a phone interview from Afghanistan. 

In the country's southern Helmand province — a swath once so volatile that an additional 10,000 Marines were massed there three years ago — the Marine contingent will continue to shrink drastically over the next three weeks, said Berger, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division (Forward). 

"We’re not going to give out detailed numbers on where we’ll end up, but it’s a cut of about two-thirds of the size of strength here (compared to) a year ago, and it will be somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 Marines when we finish up," Berger said. 

"There will be more Marines and soldiers and equipment moving in August than any other month. All the ones that are deploying from Afghanistan on the Marine Corps side, they’re going back to their home bases on the East Coast, on the West Coast."

Adek Berry / AFP - Getty Images

US Marines from Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion 8th Marines Regiment patrol in Garmser, Helmand Province on June 29.

The pullout of U.S. forces this year is expected to reach 23,000 total troops. The NATO coalition's combat mission in Afghanistan is scheduled to finish at the end of 2014. Last year, President Obama ordered 10,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.

While shifting more control to Afghan security forces and Afghan police, Berger said he has seen "amazing progress last year into this year," first, in terms of the Afghans' military development and, second, in their available fighting equipment and ability to man those tools.

"The third part is confidence — confidence in themselves and the people’s confidence in them," Berger said, "Each week, they’re more confident in what they can do in the field. The police are more confident. The people can begin to trust them in a way that was really challenging a year and a half ago.

"Now, I think the people (here) see the Afghan security forces as ... really the public face of their government. So the more they see of this, the more confidence people have that the Afghan government can protect them, can take care of them. So from where we sit, it’s absolutely going in the right direction."

However, Berger acknowledged that the massive swarm of Marines headed home — particularly those who will be retiring from the military and trying to enroll in college or land civilian jobs — will only begin that long transitionary phase after they return to the United States. 

"It happens after they leave country for the most part," Berger said. "While they’re over here, they’re pretty much occupied by the reason they were sent here. 

"But those who make the decision to move on into their civilian life, when they get back they’ll go into a formal program that first will lay out all the benefits coming to them. There’s a second part that helps them prepare for everything from doing a resume to doing an interview, to narrowing a field of choice, to getting an education.

"If you had gone through that process of separating from the service to entering the civilian world four or five years ago, you would be very much surprised by the program that’s in place right now — in a good way," Berger said. 

Related: Obama announces 'reverse bootcamp' for veterans

Still, with tens of thousands of service members headed home, that influx will only further tax a huge backlog of disability claims already clogging the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and it could potentially exacerbate a high college drop-out rate and sluggish job hiring now plaguing many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Slideshow: Afghanistan: Nation at a crossroads

Ahmad Jamshid / AP

More than ten years after the beginning of the war, Afghanistan faces external pressure to reform as well as ongoing internal conflicts.

Launch slideshow

Retired sergeant Thomas Maretich, who in June earned a medical retirement from the Army, said he knows of many service members still in Afghanistan — and some still in Iraq - who "are not letting go those jobs" because they worry that what awaits them in America is simply the unemployment line. 

"They’re afraid. This is the worst possible time for anybody to look for work let alone anybody who has been wounded and has the cards stacked up against them," said Maretich, who was wounded by a car bomb in Iraq in 2009 and has had trouble finding work in his current city, Colorado Springs. "They could retire (from the military) at 20 ...  They just don't see a job in the civilian world that is safe and pays the same."

What's more, "they don't have enough mental health (help available) now at the VA. Many soldiers will need medical care for problems with their neck, back, or knees and the system that is already trying to catch up will be paralyzed again," he said. "Mix in budget cuts and what a mess we will have."

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