The unemployment rate among younger veterans continues to outpace the share of out-of-work civilians with nearly one in 10 ex-service members from the Iraq and Afghanistan eras hunting for jobs, according to figures released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Younger male veterans are dragging a collective unemployment rate of 9 percent, compared to 7.6 percent in February 2012. Younger female veterans, who have faced far stiffer challenges grabbing civilian paychecks, posted an unemployment rate of 11.6 percent last month versus 7.4 percent at this time last year, the BLS said. 

In raw numbers, 203,000 post-9/11 veterans were unemployed in February. One year ago that number totaled 154,000. Their overall unemployment rate was 9.4 percent in February. The U.S. unemployment rate last month was 7.7 percent, the Labor Department reports.

“The problem of veteran unemployment should be seen as a national disgrace,” said Cleve Geer, national commander of AMVETS, a nonprofit veterans' organization.

Many of those men and women possess — literally — battle-hardened skills, if not the ability to work under fire, yet some employers seem unable or unwilling to transfer those strengths into civilian jobs, veterans groups say.

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“It’s hard for me to believe that a guy can drive a truck in combat but he can’t drive one on the highways. I mean, what the hell is that all about?” said John E. Hamilton, commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “You’ve got a (medical) corpsman out there in field with Marines doing everything short of open-heart surgery but he can’t be an EMT when he gets home. Are you kidding me?”

Yet the veteran-jobless rate soon may spike as sequestration forces federal agencies to hack budgets.

“That's definitely sending shockwaves around our community,” said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq War veteran and founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit advocacy group representing more than 200,000 members.

“One third of our members work in government some place. A lot are at the TSA, the Pentagon, and Homeland Security, working as civilians,” Rieckhoff said. “We also have a lot working in the contracting space.”

'Everybody's worried'
Among the 20 U.S. companies that hire and retain the most veterans — as ranked by G.I. Jobs — seven of those businesses cater strongly or even entirely to military personnel or federal agencies, including Booz Allen, a management consulting firm that holds contracts with the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation.

“Those (contracting) jobs for veterans are definitely going to be cut back some,” said Bob Tanner, a federally employed systems analyst and former Marine corporal who served in Iraq. He was unemployed from August 2006 until February 2007 after leaving the military. “There’s still a huge gap (in veteran-versus-civilian employment). But I think that gap is going to continue to grow if there’s a lot of layoffs.”

Added Rieckhoff: “In our population, everybody’s worried.”

In late February, however, his organization partnered with Futures Inc. and Cisco to launch an online employment tool called Career Pathfinder, which Rieckhoff vows, “can be the fuel injection that gets us to deeper impacts.” The free site helps translate specialized military skills to civilian jobs. It provides thousands of active job listings from employers who want to hire veterans as well as resume-building help and a career-mapping tool.

For months, though, the employment landscape has become increasingly laced with online tools meant to connect veterans to jobs, including VetNet, rolled out last November by Google and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “Hiring Our Heroes” program. Is this the innovation that finally breaks the stubborn logjam?

“We hope so. It’s definitely got tremendous potential," Rieckhoff said.

The blueprint, he added: “is taking what normally happens at a career job fair and using technology to do all that at greater scale. If you think about the overall numbers (of post-9/11 veterans), you’re talking about a couple hundred thousand people who are unemployed. So if we can get a couple thousand employed from this program, we can make a real dent.” 

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The five men are not her brothers. But that’s what she calls them.

The five initials are not for her children. But many who spot her non-sleeved left arm ask if the tight stack of black letters represents her kids. The question bothers her.

From the top of her booming bicep — where “M.G. 27 JAN 07” is positioned — to the bottom of the bulge — where “B.E.” rests — Army Reserve Drill Sgt. Victoria Parker’s limb permanently honors the five fellow soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there. Images of those those tattoos also went on display Tuesday as part of “Vet Ink,” an exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash.

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“The motto is: ‘Always remember, never forgot.’ I told them I would always remember them. And by putting it on my arm, I remember them every day. I think about them every day,” said Parker, 27, who lives in Vancouver. Her largest, accompanying tattoo depicts the “fallen soldier battle cross” — a helmet poised on a standing rifle placed inside empty, unlaced boots. That was inked from a photo she snapped of the memorial shrine set up for Army Sgt. Blair Emery (“B.E.”), killed in a roadside bomb attack in 2007 in Taji, just north of Baghdad.

“The tattoos helped me cope and move on and still honor their memories,” Parker said. “It’s no longer painful.”

“Vet Ink” is the brainchild of Susan Tissot, executive director of the museum, located in a city rich with Army roots. Before the Civil War, then-Capt. Ulysses S. Grant was quartermaster at the Columbia Army Barracks in that town. Vancouver has also served as home to part of the 104th Infantry Division.

“The Army is very prevalent in everything we do — there are a lot of veterans here, a lot of Army personnel and our former mayor was a colonel in the Army. My father-in-law is a retired Naval officer,” Tissot said. “It’s a very personal exhibit.

“I knew the tattoos told a story," she added. "It’s a very touching story." 

“Vet Ink” spans military members who served from the 1950s through to today’s armed forces — 11 veterans (or active members or reserves) spanning every branch but the Coast Guard. Each panel details their time in uniform as well as when and why they decided to get tattooed.

Some of the images, like those gracing Parker’s arm, represent the “memorial” category of ink art that recall the fallen or a certain battle. Among military tattoos — a tradition that sprouted among Navy sailors generations ago but now are commonplace among post-9/11 veterans — are the other three classes: “patriotic” (flags, eagles), “spiritual” (a star, a cross, the Virgin Mary), and “identity,” (a specific unit, battalion or division), according to Kristina Wells, the museum’s collections manager.

“There’s been an interesting evolution in what tattoos the military would even accept. Our Vietnam veteran in the exhibit and one of the other 1960s service guys who took part didn’t get their tattoos until they were in their 60s. It was less accepted by the military back then,” Wells said. “If you were tattooed, you maybe wouldn’t even be accepted into the Army and Marines (during that era).”

Later, military regulations were relaxed, and banned tattoos on the neck and face.

The ink also once carried something of a “hidden” code, especially in the Navy, according to the museum. For example, the image of a sparrow or swallow signified having traveled 5,000 or more miles. Tattoos of pigs or roosters were good-luck charms meant to prevent drowning because those animals often were carried in wooden crates, which would float if the ship ever sank.

For Parker, the tattoos also serve as a shorthand account of her combat experiences for any other veterans who spy them — an “automatic understanding” and a “unifying symbol.” She said she and fellow veterans can read one another’s service history from their ink.

But for those who haven’t served, she said, there is often misunderstanding.

“I get a lot of people asking me if they’re my kids. That’s frustrating and hurtful,” Parker said. “The female veterans, we’re so invisible. People don’t assume we’re veterans at all.”

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With one in five post-9/11 female veterans temporarily locked out of the job market, hundreds of ex-military women have discovered a promising financial side door: self-employment.

A new survey of 800 female veterans-turned-entrepreneurs finds that 55 percent say the leadership skills they learned in uniform ultimately pushed them to become their own boss.

But nearly half of those same women acknowledge they don’t have a business plan to help navigate their next two years, while 28 percent report their greatest need is learning how to find and retain new customers, according to the poll conducted by Capital One Financial Corporation and Count Me In For Women's Economic Independence, a nonprofit.

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To help bolster the growing pool of female veterans who have launched small businesses — and, simultaneously, create more jobs for ex-service members — Capital One and Count Me In have partnered to launch the Women Veteran Entrepreneur Corps (WVEC).

Hatched as a training and mentorship program, WVEC aims to help female small business owners who are veterans (as well as their spouses or domestic partners) overcome common entrepreneurial pitfalls and plot future revenue growth.

For seed money, Capital One said it has committed $800,000 toward the program.

“The energy and motivation that women veterans bring to their business ventures is unmatched, and we are very excited to use our experience helping women reach their entrepreneurial potential to help this important — and growing — group of new entrepreneurs,” Nell Merlino, founder and President of Count Me In, said in a prepared statement.

Beyond the money and research, Count Me In and Capital One plan to christen the WVEC initiative with a conference and business-pitch competition for women small business owners who are military veterans on Dec. 3 and 4. The event is slated to take place in McLean, Va., and is expected to attract hundreds of women veterans and business growth experts to participate in a variety of panels and workshops — some led by women veterans.

To help women prepare for the December WEVC event, Count Me In also will host for business owners a series of free “pitch parties” in select U.S. cities. At those gatherings, participating women can practice their two-minute business pitches and get instant, expert feedback, the nonprofit said. Individuals can register for the WVEC pitch parties and the December conference by clicking hmere.

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Julie Weckerlein vividly recalls the horrid sounds that filled her base - and her head - after the incoming shell exploded: the radio call summoning the chaplain, the whirling blades of the chopper evacuating the burned remains of the Army sergeant killed in Iraq

Five years later, she still remembers the name of that dead soldier: Trista Morietti. 

“Females died over there, too,” said Weckerlein, who served in Afghanistan as well. She works today as a full-time federal employee in Washington, D.C. “But there is a cultural disconnect in our society. People don’t know: What is a female veteran? What does she look like? What does she bring to the table? What did we do over there?”  

Women compose 15 percent of homecoming U.S. troops and 15 percent of the U.S. armed forces, yet many Americans are unsure how to accept or view them, female veterans say. That applies to the job market, fueling a 19.9 percent unemployment rate among post-9/11 female veterans, while some VA hospitals seem unprepared to handle the heavy influx of women returning from war, contends a leading veterans group.

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"I’m the first female veteran that a lot of people know personally, and I’m becoming more aware of this lack of understanding of who we are," said Weckerlein, who spent nine years in the Air Force. Now, 31, she is married with three children and, as an Air Force reservist, she also works part-time at the Pentagon. "There is no real example in society of a female veteran. In Hollywood, there's just the 'GI Jane' version – you know, like Demi Moore shaving her head. But that’s about it.

"We are a normal family. My husband is addicted to (the TV series) 'Pawn Stars.' My 9-year-old and I, we struggle with homework. I struggle with DC life and the commute. This is a female veteran." 

Last week, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group with more than 200,000 members, called on President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney to cast at least some of their attention on the mounting and - as IAVA sees it - unaddressed needs afflicting female veterans. That heightened focus, IAVA said, should begin with how the Department of Veterans Affairs provides health care to female ex-service members. 

"There aren’t enough female health professionals in the VA system. There aren’t enough folks specialized in female health, especially around reproductive health. We’ve got to push the system to work harder for them," said Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive officer and founder of IAVA

"The bottom line is you need someone who recognizes that female veterans are a critical part of this population and that they have unique needs," added Rieckhoff, who served as a first lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq during 2003 and 2004. "We’ve got women on our staff who say that a lot of times, when they walk into the VA, they get treated like a candy striper instead of like a returning warrior. As a country, we've got to go through a huge cultural shift." 

VA officials maintain, however, that their agency has launched multiple initiatives to cater to the rising number of female veterans using its hospitals. Last Friday, NBC News asked a VA spokesman to lay out some of those programs. On Wednesday, that spokesman emailed NBC News a series of Internet links describing the strategies, adding: "Nearly all of these programs are new in the past few years (2-4 years), and some have simply been enhanced. Of course, women vets are eligible for VA programs just as males would be too."

For example, the VA's Women Health Services "addresses the health care needs of women Veterans and works to ensure that timely, equitable, high-quality, comprehensive health care services are provided in a sensitive and safe environment at VA health facilities nationwide," says the VA website. "We strive to be a national leader in the provision of health care for women, thereby raising the standard of care for all women."

In 2007, the VA broadened the scope of Women Health Services to include the use of mammography machines, ultrasound and biopsy equipment, the VA reports.

'Didn't know what to do with me'
But Air Force veteran Terri Kaas, 29, said that after being seen at two VA hospitals near her home in Pasco, Wash., for knee problems she said were sustained during overseas service, she felt the staff at those VA facilities "didn't know what do with me." Kaas, who received a 20 percent disability rating after leaving the Air Force, said the VA also recently admitted to her that it had lost her medical records, leaving her pension and disability package pending, and allowing her to use VA facilities to receive only "some care that's service related."

When she did go in for treatment, Kaas described the VA visits this way: "Here you have a young woman – who is not old – who mostly likely will have another child or two. But I think they’re always amazed to see me. They’re like, 'Oh, is your husband here?' I’m like, 'No, it’s me. You're seeing me.' I’m used to being the only female in the lobby."

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Kaas, who served for 10 years, spending time in Bahrain and Germany, also has been snared by the second critical pitfall facing one in five post-9/11-female veterans: unemployment. She said she has more than 100 rejection letters to show for her job hunt during the past year. More troubling, she said, numerous hiring managers have asked if she is "service disabled." 

"Every job I've applied for that required both my resume and their corporate application asked that question. Are we discriminating against our wounded warriors? Starbucks, Walmart, Macy's, Amazon, Target, and Lockheed Martin are just a few who asked," Kaas posted on Facebook. Amid looking for work, she is attending college with hopes of becoming a math or science teacher. 

"That question astounds me - and it's always the follow-up question to: Are you a veteran?" Kaas said in a phone interview. "If Walmart won’t hire me at Christmas, when they're advertising, I kind of wonder what the reason is. I’m not trying to dime out Walmart. I’ve applied for work at many major department stores. But when I can’t get work at Walmart, I wonder: Why not? There’s other people getting hired there during the holidays."

The disability question, Kaas suspects, is asked because some hiring managers "assume that most veterans have PTSD."

"I don't know if it's legal to ask that but it certainly doesn't seem appropriate," said John E. Pickens III, executive director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit that has offered financial counseling to more than 150,000 current and former service members. He agrees that such a query by hiring managers "is being driven by mental health concerns."

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Said Walmart spokeswoman Tara Raddohl: "That question is not standard practice or a part of our company interview process. We’re looking into this specifically" (at the Walmart store where Kaas applied for a job).

A number of Pickens' female-veteran clients have told him that although they served in war zones, they don't seem to earn the same level of prestige - or employability - as do U.S. male combat veterans, "and they don't carry home that same mantel as a warrior."

'Hey, I'm a female veteran'
Yet many carry home combat tales equally as harrowing as those being told by male veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just ask Julie Weckerlein. 

After the insurgent shell detonated at the coalition base in Nasir Lafitah, Iraq, Weckerlein didn't know the name of the casualty - Trista Morietti, 27 - until she returned to her own post in Baghdad and read the incident report. Several U.S. service members were wounded as well when that mortar round landed on a sleeping quarters just a few yards from Weckerlein's position. 

"I also spent a lot of time reading up all the hometown articles and blogs her friends wrote about her. Hers was the first death I experienced on my deployment, and that she was also a 20-something female NCO really affected me," Weckerlein said. "I felt so sick for the family members back in the states who had no idea what was going on at that moment. Later, actually seeing those family members and their pain ... it tore out my heart.

"I think of all the awesome women who served alongside me, who are struggling to find work, and it just baffles me because they are so qualified," she added. "It just motivates me to want to go out there and say, 'Hey, I’m a female veteran.' "

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American businesses are carving out more room for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan − finally driving the overall unemployment rate for that group into single digits in September. But joblessness for the U.S. women home from war continued to climb, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. 

The portion of post-9/11 veterans seeking work fell to 9.7 percent last month, compared to 10.1 percent in August and 11.7 percent in September 2011, according to BLS figures.

However, nearly one out of five women who served in the military at home or abroad during the two wars is now without a job, the new BLS statistics show. As the U.S. troop drawdown continues in Afghanistan, the unemployment rate for post-9/11 female vets surged to 19.9 percent in September, compared to 14.7 percent a year earlier and 12.1 percent in August.

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"More women were deployed than ever before but an awful lot of them are single moms who face the challenge of coming home," said John E. Pickens III, executive director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit that has offered financial counseling to more than 150,000 current and former service members. 

 

 

"Someone has been taking care of their kids, and now they want to refocus their lives on being mom. Often, though, the kind of employment that may be available to them is not sufficient to help them meet that dream of both working and being that stable mom," added Pickens, a combat medic with the U.S. Army Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne Division in the early 1970s. 

And while many companies trumpet their patriotic side by plucking male combat veterans and plunking them into corporate roles, women who served with some of those same guys often are not viewed by employers with the same level of admiration, Pickens has been told my some of his female clients. In short: Women who logged time in the war zones don't earn the same level of prestige - or employability - are do U.S. males who recently were in the line of fire. 

"They are misunderstood and challenged in a number of ways," Pickens said. "Typically, folks look at male veterans returning as warriors who we need to honor, and say we need to do what we can for these warriors. Women, unfortunately, don’t carry home that same mantel as a warrior. But they certainly have served beside the men and, in many cases, have done a lot of things that put themselves as risk."

Women comprise about 15 percent of the U.S. military, said Genevieve Chase, founder of American Women Veterans, a foundation that works to improve the lives of women veterans and their families. She served in Afghanistan in 2006 and remains in the U.S. Army Reserves. She earned a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in a blast in Helmand Province when a car-packed with explosives smashed into the truck in which she was riding. She describes herself as "currently unemployed" - and has been, she said, for almost all of 2012, living off of what's left of her savings. 

"A huge part of it is we come home and we don't wear the warrior archetype on our sleeves," Chase said. "We do come home and the American public doesn't understand what we do overseas; they don't quite know how to receive us, don't know how to relate to us. Even some of our brothers, even some of the men who we served with, don't quite know how to relate to us." 

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Still, some U.S. companies, including Citi and Ryder, have shifted hiring priorities and are hiring more former service members, helping to trim the jobless rate among post-9/11 veterans, Pickens said. Ryder has put ex-military folks into driving and technical positions. Citi is helping move people from the battlefield to Wall Street. 

"Certainly, I think some companies, big and small, are realizing these men and women make excellent employees because of their commitment to duty, because of all the traits instilled in them in the military," Pickens said. "And the more that easily recognizable companies like Ryder, like Citi are seen hiring veterans, the more other smaller businesses and organizations will say, 'My goodness. Look at this. Maybe I should I check this out?'"

But the mission to re-employ more ex-service members is far from complete, contends a leading veterans group whose chief executive officer said he remains "deeply concerned" about the lack of attention paid to the issue by America's political leaders - particularly its presidential candidates.

During Wednesday night's debate, for example, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney both failed to adequately address pressing veterans issues - including the fact that post-9/11 veterans remain strapped with an unemployment rate that's higher than the rest of the U.S. workforce, said Paul Rieckhoff, CEO and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit group with more than 200,000 members. 

“Veteran joblessness was not mentioned once," said Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran who called the latest unemployment statistics "appalling," noting that roughly 250,000 post-9/11 veterans are now out of work.

"It's something most Americans don't realize until we are reminded. And this (lack of candidate attention) is in such contrast to the last two presidential elections, when Iraq and Afghanistan and the troops were such a centerpiece," he said. 

"Because the war (in Iraq) has ended doesn't mean the people who served there have just gone away — I mean 2.4 million of them were in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens of thousands are still over there. There are long-term social, financial and human costs to being at war for 10 years. The candidates have a moral obligation to focus on those folks. The war may be over for the civilian population. But for us, in many ways, it's still going on."

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