When I joined the U.S. Air Force, I went through a six-week boot camp. It was a
systematic, very deliberate way of changing me from a civilian into a member of the
military. And it didn’t stop there! There was an entire in-processing protocol that
connected me at every level with the service branch into which I was entering.
When I left the Air Force, there was a week of optional seminars crammed in with
everyone else getting discharged called the Transition Assistance Program, or TAP.
This was basically an exercise in checking the boxes, with little thought given to the
importance of the process. We were about to leave a very structured environment that
provided a regular paycheck, great benefits and never knowing where you had to be in
the morning. We were about to enter the unknown.
The failure of TAP is that it fails the service member as they reenter society. So what’s
the solution? A public-private partnership between the Departments of Defense and
Veterans Affairs on one end and local government and industry on the other end is a
good place to start.
