Vets4Vets helps soldiers adjust to civilian life

Mike Sakal, January 9, 2009
Tribune – original article

After returning home from service in Iraq for seven months, Matt Randle said he felt like a foreigner in a foreign land.

As a medic with the U.S. Army’s 507th Maintenance Co. in 2003 in Iraq, Randle witnessed the unthinkable: fellow servicemen who had just been killed as he drove along roads headed into combat and arriving into small towns with 14 other soldiers, all of whom were expected to take it over and take the lives of the enemy.

In the months that followed in his return home, Randle said he was hypervigilant about his safety. He slept with a gun beside his bed, awoke every hour to check if the front door was locked and said he still has nightmares of the things he saw in Iraq.

“If you don’t have a way to start talking about things like that, it’ll eat you alive,” Randle, 27, said.

Randle and Sgt. Abel Moreno, both of whom have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, will be among 36 other veterans who served in either Afghanistan or Iraq attending a leadership conference this weekend at the Fiesta Resort Conference Center in Tempe for Vets4Vets.

Vets4Vets is a national nonprofit organization based in Tucson and has a mission of reaching out to peers who are readjusting to civilian life after spending long periods of time in combat and away from their families.

Randle is the outreach director for Vets4Vets, and Moreno serves as its development coordinator.

By traveling around the country and helping to form outreach peer groups, Vets4Vets provides a service for veterans from the same generation who share a common bond: a way to unload their emotions and come to terms that they no longer are living the life of a soldier.

“Our generation of veterans provide a network of support where people understand their experiences,” said Moreno, who grew up in Chandler.

After Moreno returned home from serving in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2002 to 2004, he also had experiences similar to Randle’s.

“My biggest adjustment was coming back and providing for my family and figuring out what I was going to do,” said Moreno, who has a wife and three children. “When I was in the service, I was in charge of other men. When I was out of the service, I worked different jobs and had to get used to not doing the same things I did in the service.”

The number of veterans who have served in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 or in Iraq since early 2003, now stands at 1.8 million, according to statistics from the Veterans Administration in Washington.

“Who understands the experiences of a veteran better than veterans themselves?” Randle said. “These conflicts have been going on for a while, and it gets to be trying.”