Story thread · 16 reports / 13 sources

America's story intertwined with its military history, but a military-civilian disconnect persists

nbcdfw.com · 12dShare

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 d

First report: America’s story intertwined with its military history, but a military-civilian disconnect persists — apnews.com, 13d