AF Colonel Goes From Pentagon to Homelessness

I can believe it. Went thru the same thing. Too old to get a programming job, "over-qualified" to get a low-level job. Finally got a job as server at Waffle House.
I was within two weeks of living in my car when I got the job at Waffle House.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/06/air-force-colonel-goes-from-pentagon-to-homelessness.html#.UtQgs8s3qX8.facebook

Philadelphia Inquirer | Jan 06, 2014

After a 30-year military career in which he earned three graduate degrees, rose to the rank of colonel, and served as an aide to Pentagon brass, Robert Freniere can guess what people might say when they learn he's unemployed and lives out of his van:

Why doesn't this guy get a job as a janitor?

Freniere answers his own question: "Well, I've tried that."

Freniere, 59, says that his plea for help, to a janitor he once praised when the man was mopping the floors of his Washington office, went unfulfilled. So have dozens of job applications, he says, the ones he has filled out six hours a day, day after day, on public library computers.

So Freniere, a man who braved multiple combat zones and was hailed as "a leading light" by an admiral, is now fighting a new battle: homelessness.

As of January 2012, more than 60,000 veterans were homeless, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Reducing that number has been a priority for the Obama administration -- and the number of homeless veterans dropped 24 percent nationwide from 2009 to 2013. In Pennsylvania, however, it jumped 46 percent, to more than 1,400.

Joblessness among returning servicemembers is even more common. Freniere describes a monthly lunch he has attended in Washington, a hushed tradition that he says attracts about 200 veterans. After they eat, the men and women who are unemployed stand up one by one to recite their service records, hoping someone else in the room will hire them.

Many, he says, are highly accomplished.

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Spots are hard to come by. Freniere, like many of his fellow down-on-their-luck veterans, does not match any hat-in-hand Hollywood image of homelessness. He receives an annual pension from the military of more than $40,000.

His struggle to find a job after retiring from the Air Force collided with the end of his marriage nearly two years ago. Unable to return to the home he shared with his estranged wife, and faced with expenses including bills for two sons in college and debts that mounted when he maintained a nicer lifestyle, he took up a nomadic existence.

Between spells on the couches of friends in multiple states, he sleeps occasionally in motels and other times in the dented blue van.

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In 2005, Freniere said, he volunteered to go to Iraq. "Everybody thought I was nuts, especially my sons," who were 15 and 13 at the time, he said. "But I'm a counterterrorism guy. That's what I do."

But as he was preparing to deploy, he said, he felt his legs go numb one day. He had suffered from back pain since he was injured in his 20s, when a soldier he was training to operate a tank fired the gun too soon.

Three days after the numbness began, Freniere underwent back surgery. Instead of flying to Iraq, he spent a year and a half convalescing, he said. In 2006, he retired from the Air Force.

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Freniere says dyslexia makes focusing on a computer screen difficult. Online applications are so hard for him, he said, that tears well in his eyes as he describes his days at public libraries.

"How many applications can you fill out in a day? And it takes you six or seven hours, and then you don't hear from any of them. You start getting hopeless," he said.

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tags: age discrimination