Mark Bryant, who will turn 50 years old in August, still sleeps on his mother’s living room floor, unable to find work for the past seven years.

Juanita Shanks, 36, joined the Army Medical Corps to pursue nursing a year after graduating high school and, when she was finished, had to learn how to be an adult civilian.

Jeroam Washington, a 55-year-old military veteran, has been told over and over that he’s “overqualified” for job positions.

At the inaugural Veterans Summit, held May 25 at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium at 5400 NW 22nd Ave., former military personnel took the floor to tell their stories and describe their struggles since returning to civilian life.

“The job market wasn’t prepared to accept veterans back,” Washington explained. “When I tried to apply for a job, prepared to work, I was told I was too disciplined. But this is what the military teaches us to do.”

Washington went on to explain that employers should embrace having a “disciplined” employee who arrives on time and wants to get the job done. “What does ‘overqualified’ mean?” he asked.

Thousands of military personnel return home every year, not prepared or even aware of the troubles ahead.

Shanks explained that, while in the medical corps, she received various benefits.

“Health care for myself and my sons was paid for,” she said. “Now it’s not. Having served our country, some things should be in place [when veterans return].”

Although Shanks makes about $39,000 a year, she still finds it difficult to afford owning a home. Standing in front of the transitional housing panel seated on the auditorium stage, she asked, “What about workforce housing?” She said her life as a civilian would be more comfortable if she could find independent housing that she could afford.

While there are options, panel members — among them individuals affiliated with Carrfour Supportive Housing, the VA and Volunteers of America — explained that many veterans have had to search hard for answers and jump through hoops to gain access to resources and benefits.

Charles Cutler, CEO of the Veterans Employment Transition Service, Inc., hopes to change that.

“We want to create a streamlined process through our office and our network of providers so our veterans can get effective service,” explained Cutler. “There’s so much bureaucracy involved that it’s hard to gain access [to the information]. Sometimes it can take 10 to 20 years until problems are resolved.”

Bryant, who left the military in 1981, admitted he has had many doors slammed in his face.

“It’s discouraging and frustrating,” he explained. “You want to lose hope.”

Bryant said he has suffered from depression and even contemplated suicide, adding that he still sees a psychiatrist.

Most of the veterans in attendance were older, mainly from the Vietnam generation, but Cutler explained the need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

“We want to try to catch the veterans at a younger age as they are coming home,” he said.

Dr. Terry Lyles, a nationally recognized stress coach who lives in Miami, also emphasizes the importance of debriefing military personnel after they return home, primarily to lessen the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or “combat stress.”

Combat stress, Lyles explained, is an “over stimulus response” to ongoing tragedy, commonly known as “shell shock.”

“When you come home after 18 months, it’s hard to shut it off,” he said. “When the stress hormone cortisol is secreted in our bodies for that long, it does damage. The things that might cause an average person to be fearful turn into extreme anxiety. Irrational thinking is now paranoia.”

The sense of smell, which Lyles said is the strongest psychological sense in the human body, can trigger flashbacks and nightmares.

To deal with combat stress effectively, Lyles briefs military personnel before they leave the service, often prescribing his three-step process.

“Step one is to vent. If you don’t vent, you explode,” he said. “Step two is to acknowledge what happened. They dodged bullets and cheated death and they have to realize they aren’t invincible.”

Lyles said it is not uncommon for returning veterans to hop on motorcycles or go bungee-jumping.

“Step three is to process that trauma. Write it down and then destroy it. It’s not meant to be grammatically fixed or reflected upon six months later,” he said. “We need to journal the positive things and keep it, and process the negative and destroy it.”

While those attending the Veterans Summit hope to more readily re-assimilate returning Iraq War veterans, Lyles does not have a good outlook for the mental state of future returnees.

Lyles said he has been to the Pentagon to discuss reformatting the “Stress Recovery Manual” he created following Hurricane Katrina, which is available free of charge via his Web site, to meet the needs of veterans and their families.

“It’s overwhelming. We’ve never seen anything like it since probably the Civil War,” Lyles said. “I’ve estimated about 15 to 20 percent coming back right now already have combat stress symptoms.”

Lyles estimated those numbers will escalate to 50 to 75 percent, based on what he has seen.

“[Combat stress] doesn’t ever go away,” he added. “You have to learn to deal with it. It’s part of your life.”

Current veterans hope American soldiers returning home from Iraq find a larger window of opportunity than they did.

“The window closed so quickly we didn’t even know it was there,” Shanks said. “They deserve better than that. We have to work together.”

As for the older veterans such as Bryant, he said the Veterans Summit was like a “crossroads.”

“I feel like I’m at a halfway point. We can come together as veterans. There’s still hope,” he said. “I have a new ray of hope since coming to the forum.”

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