NEW YORK (AP) — The realization brought Qwynn Galloway-Salazar to tears.
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NEW YORK (AP) — The realization brought Qwynn Galloway-Salazar to tears.
NEW YORK (AP) — The realization brought Qwynn Galloway-Salazar to tears.
She was looking for civilian work two decades ago after leaving the Army Reserves, but what she saw was the disconnect between her and the panel of interviewers. As a Black woman, she didn’t fit the stereotypes of who veterans were or what military service looked like.
“They thought of a veteran to be a white male who served in Vietnam,” said Galloway-Salazar, who has built her professional life since then around veteran issues and working to increase the public’s awareness.
“I realized the minute I sat in that room that that interview panel did not know what the heck to do with me,” she said. “And I remember going to my car and crying because my thought was, what am I going to do now?”
Her experience illustrates two delicate questions that the country rarely, if ever, confronts: In this experiment in democratic life that has run for 250 years, how can military and civilian life sit so far away from each other? And how can that divide be crossed?
Military service is threaded through American life
The soldiers. The sailors. The battles. The conflicts.
There is no recounting of the U.S. story where its very existence as a nation isn’t intertwined with its military history, from its creation in 1776 to the expansion of its physical borders to its role in the global political and economic order.
A number of those threads can be found running through the weave of ordinary American life. Some are in the lessons American students learn and the monuments people visit. Some are in public rituals at sporting events and holiday commemorations. Some are in the way that “Thank you for your service” is a commonplace saying aimed at veterans and those in uniform.
In a nation that lionizes an idea of military service, most American adults don’t serve, or aren’t very connected to the people who do and their families to have a sense of what their lives are like. Those who do serve often end up coming from generations of the same families, or the same communities, from certain states more than others. It’s a concentration that can make the responsibilities and burdens of military life land disproportionately on them.
The public pays little attention unless there’s a crisis situation, like the concerns over mental health for USS Abraham Lincoln sailors who had been on an expanded deployment as part of the U.S. war against Iran, in which 18 service members have been killed and more than 750 injured since its start six months ago.
Source: Read the original article on www.winnipegfreepress.com
