" I don't fit that stereotype.  I'm young, I'm under the age of 30.  So most people can't understand how I was deployed not once, but twice.  They don't necessarily take me at face value if I say, "You know, I'm a veteran," it's almost like I have to prove it somehow.  Sometimes I'll just say, "Oh yeah, I work on an organic vegetable farm. " I don't say, "I work on a farm for veterans," because then that just raises other questions.  I got back from Iraq in 2009.  So I essentially went from being in Iraq, carrying a gun, wearing a bulletproof vest, walking around on a FOB, to being a civilian out on my own, unemployed, no job, in about two and a half weeks.  There was no transition period.  I became fairly depressed pretty quickly.  I was home by myself all the time, didn't have any sort of community or network around me, and I'd gone from living and breathing and working with the same group of people, some of them I'd known the entire five years I was in the military, to just being out on my own by myself.  I started drinking pretty heavily.  I struggled with a little bit of some suicidal thoughts at the time.  I was in such a major state of depression and so upset about not only how the military had treated me, but how. . .  my capacity in the military had led me to treat others that I just, I didn't see my life ever getting any better.  And so I just left and fell off the face of the planet for several months, and didn't talk to anybody or communicate with anybody and just vanished.  And then I kinda just went on this cross-country road trip of sorts.  Felt like the more time I spent on the road the more kind of space I had for me to kinda clear my mind and process my life and just kind of figure out what direction I wanted to go next.  Chicago was the last place I was when I ran out of money so that's where I stayed and tried to build a life. 
 
 
 I met a lot of people in Chicago that were from this organization called Iraq Veterans Against The War and they kinda helped pull me together and provided support and resources for a lot of other veterans.  Together, we kind of held each other up.  Through IVAW, I had met Steve Acheson and his partner, Stephanie.  He came across this farm managing position here in Wisconsin and put out the word to all the veterans he knows that he needed assistance and I kinda jumped on it and here I am.  One of the major things I struggled with when getting out of the military was finding meaningful work.  Working in the ground I feel is very helpful and therapeutic to me.  I could go to the VA and talk to a shrink, and, you know, talk myself blue in the face, and not necessarily get the same feeling that I get being out in the field for 10 minutes.  The military itself is such a destructive culture, that sometimes it's really a breath of fresh air to not be destroying something and to instead be growing something and giving life to something and nurturing it.  No matter how down and out and depressed I am, the plants need me to go water them, the plants need me to go weed them or they will die, and that provides a sense of purpose to my life.  We have what's called a worker-share program.  Some of those worker-shares are veterans, but a large percentage of them are also civilians and it's kind of for the first time since getting out of the military forced me to interact with the overall population, which has been a good thing for me and I think pushed me along further into my transition into civilian life.  Being on the farm has by far been the most helpful thing I've found in recent years.  It just is a good balance of anything and everything I've kind of ever looked for.  All that time I spent driving around the country, this turns out to be what I was searching for the whole time.  I just didn't know it.  (pleasant guitar music)