My earliest memory of adulting, was voluntarily engaging with a Marine Corps recruiter, when I turned nineteen. He seemed welcoming enough, and his crisp professional military demeanor appealed to me in a strange way. I wasn’t sure I would like the Marine Corps, but I was sure that the adventure aspect of enlisting, far outweighed the probability of a mundane existence on the familiar trodden territory of my home town.
It just so happened that I took to Marine Corps life like a duck to water, as they say. Within a few months I had grown exponentially in self awareness and even beyond the rigors of training, while I performed the specific military functions of my assigned specialty, I continued to learn and grow every day. It wasn’t always easy, but I learned how to embrace productive pain, and for nearly ten years, I stood equipped and ready to meet the world’s troublesome challenges, on behalf of our nation.
Now, hold that thought and fast forward to the present. In preparing our residence to serve homeless veterans, the incongruence of what the military teaches in resourcefulness against any former military member descending into a life on the streets, was a disparity I could not ignore. It occurred to me that the first place we needed to establish the recovery of a person’s latent military virtues and applying them to their present day difficulties, was in our logo.
The two sided face is a caricature of two opposing conditions, and you can cover either side to understand the a complete picture of the other half. What we’ve attempted to do here at Warriors Once Again, is to reintroduce the homeless veterans in our program, to that aspect of their former military selves. We once understood the reasons behind the discipline’s military life required and the interconnectedness of repetitive attention to detail and overall situational awareness.
If we can reconnect those processes in our most vulnerable veterans, we can go on to reestablish their importance across every aspect of decision making and mitigate the lesser options that will put us at risk. To recover from veteran homelessness, is to truly be, a warrior once again.