Easing Veterans' Transition to Civilian Life

By Susan V. Berresford

This year's Veterans Day observations inevitably remind us of the hurdles facing American soldiers returning from Iraq. Thanks to medical and technological advances, many severely wounded veterans survive and return home, facing a long struggle. Many of the injured are young, often with limited civilian job experience and small children at home — suggesting that the challenges facing them, their families, and our society will be lasting.

Foundations and other donors can help nonprofit organizations and the military develop better ways to reintegrate today's veterans back into civilian life.

For example, a group of foundations — the Ford, Mott, Kellogg, El Pomar, Henry H. Kessler, Robert Wood Johnson, and Meadows foundations, as well as the Triad Fund of the Dallas Foundation — are sponsoring a three-state pilot project by the National Organization on Disability that will test a new approach to helping veterans and their families. The project connects disabled veterans to training and jobs, and engages veterans who are unable to work in meaningful community activities so they will gain the essential sense of self-reliance and worth that comes with work or community engagement. It will also offer long-term family counseling and assistance at each stage in the process of helping veterans resume their civilian lives.

History holds some sobering lessons in this area, most recently related to the Vietnam War. Many of today's foundation and nonprofit leaders came of age during that war, and whatever they thought about the conflict then, some find themselves decades later still dealing with its consequences.

In February, for instance, the Aspen Institute started a U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin. It brings together policy makers, scholars, and strategists from both countries to jointly devise ways to deal with the pressing human and environmental consequences of the U.S. military's defoliation campaign of the 1960s. In that period, some 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides were sprayed on forests and crops in central and southern Vietnam.

Today, dioxin, a highly toxic chemical in Agent Orange, remains at dangerously high levels in and around former U.S. military bases, in some instances working its way into local food chains. A worryingly high number of birth defects, cancers, and other diseases have now been seen in American veterans and their families, as well as in many Vietnamese veterans, civilians, their offspring, and those now living in the affected areas. While disagreements on causality remain, the association of these health effects and dioxin is striking.

For decades dioxin remained an unresolved issue between the United States and Vietnam, but fortunately that climate is changing.

In 2006, President Bush and President Nguyen Minh Triet issued a joint statement that, for the first time, acknowledged dioxin contamination as a war legacy that would benefit from joint humanitarian action. The U.S. Congress recently passed a bill providing $3-million for remediation of some of the worst sites and for health programs in surrounding communities.

The Ford Foundation has supported efforts to test dioxin levels, develop treatment and support centers, contain dioxin, restore the landscape, and educate the public about these matters. A major challenge is to halt intergenerational contamination and to reduce exposure by isolating the dioxin until it can be cleaned up.

Other donors are exploring the feasibility of creating a high-resolution dioxin testing laboratory in Vietnam so blood and soil samples will no longer have to be sent overseas for analysis. All of this work is in an early stage, and more efforts and resources will be needed.

The good news is that these problems can be addressed, but it will require decades of help for American and Vietnamese families and communities.

Those efforts remind us that the impact of war reaches far beyond any battlefield. And as we begin to confront the Iraq war's legacy, it signals the importance of working together to ensure that philanthropic resources have maximum effect. If we do that, we have the chance to shorten the long human shadow of war and demonstrate that civil society's humanitarian spirit has not ignored the veterans who have given so very much.

Susan V. Berresford is president of the Ford Foundation, in New York.