I met my wife three weeks before I deployed for the first time in the summer of 2001. We met as people met in the simpler days of the early 2000’s — at dollar beer night at a country bar.

I’d been in San Diego a month. I moved there with friends I met at Annapolis or along the way in the myriad of professional schools they send junior officers to before they’re allowed to report to their first assignments. By the time we’d reached the west coast as newly minted Naval Aviators or SEALs or Marines, it seemed like the party hadn’t really stopped. We just picked it up and dropped it down in Pacific Beach.

We were family by then. A few dropped off to marry the women who stuck with them for years of purgatory at Annapolis. But most of us were young, unattached officers staring down the barrel of five years commitment to a force that hadn’t been in sustained combat operations for nearly 30 years.

By the time I met my wife, I wasn’t interested in a wife. I wasn’t interested in a serious relationship. I wasn’t interested in anything serious; women, work or otherwise.

The dates we went on were less dates and more an assigned commingling of friends. I had my team of Navy men. She had her team of San Diego women. We spent barbecues, keg parties and dollar beer nights together. A few extreme short term relationships burned bright and flamed out. And then it was over.

I left on a ship bound for the Gulf that June. It was the summer of 2001; the last summer of peace; the last summer of the last era of history.

As the weeks and months passed, I got an occasional email from her. Usually she sent pictures of her with my friends. They went to Chargers games. They went out out to our favorite bars. I wasn’t sure if she was hanging around them because of me or for some other reason one comes up with fifteen thousand miles away when one hasn’t seen a woman in four months. I know now the reason was simple.

They were friends. She liked them. And they made her feel safe.

On September 11, the world ended. My ship, scheduled to transfer out of the Gulf the second week in September, never left. We stayed on station until November, launching the first Tomahawks into Afghanistan on October 6th.

In December when we finally came home, we were the first ship back stateside from the then two-month old Operation Enduring Freedom. There was a parade at the base. I was allowed two people on the pier to meet us. I chose my friend who was with me that night at the country bar.

And her.

She threw a Christmas/welcome home party. Our friends who hadn’t left for the war already showed up. It was the last time we’d all be together.

Out of that group of friends from that summer, there have been scores of wartime deployments. It’s been our whole careers. The war outlasted my service. It’s outlasted marriages. It’s outlasted the childhoods of our children. And sadly, it outlasted a few of my friends too. Of the extended group of friends my wife met that summer and fall, four are no longer with us.

The contrast of how she’s grieved and how I haven’t is the story I need to tell.

When I sat down to write this essay, I struggled a bit with what I wanted to say. I typed the words “inarticulate grief” in the header as a placeholder. I knew it was about grief. But mostly that I didn’t understand it or know how to talk about it. I know I’m supposed to grieve. I’m supposed to grieve my friends who are no longer with us. But I don’t.

I know how to honor them. How to fold the flag. How to hold them up as an example for us all to strive to be like. I know how to make those that love them feel like their deaths mattered. But I don’t know how to cry for them. I can’t feel the sadness.

She does.

She thinks about them. She remembers the things they did together. She cries when they die. And she smiles when she finds their picture in an old album. She remembers them.

What right does she have?

She knew them for a minute.I knew them for a lifetime. I didn’t believe that I had the right to feel sad when these men passed. I was not their best friend. Someone somewhere knew them better. It was not the worst tragedy. Someone somewhere had it worse. Grief for me is some comparatively earned privilege. For her, it’s just grief; something she feels.

She remembers that summer. I don’t.

I’ve tried to forget so much over the last 20 years that it’s hard to remember anything at all. How I’ve run from the grief of losing my friends is how I’ve run from just about everything hard this war brought us. Because pain and sadness, for me, is also some comparatively earned privilege.

No deployment I had was hard enough to make me deal with the pain it caused. Someone always had it harder. No loss suffered; no trauma absorbed was bad enough to acknowledge. Someone always had it tougher. Acknowledging it, in some way, dishonored them.

I Googled “Inarticulate Grief” to see if it were a term anyone else used. It’s something I do before I pick a title for an essay. What came back to me put me on the floor.

Inarticulate Grief was a poem written a hundred years ago by Richard Aldington, a Brit who served in WWI, in the trenches of France. He wrote poetry about war. His critics called him cynical and bitter and often contrasted what he wrote before the war and after.

This is what he wrote:

Inarticulate Grief

Let the sea beat its thin torn hands
In anguish against the shore,
Let it moan
Between headland and cliff;
Let the sea shriek out its agony
Across waste sands and marshes,
And clutch great ships,
Tearing them plate from steel plate
In reckless anger;
Let it break the white bulwarks
Of harbour and city;
Let it sob and scream and laugh
In a sharp fury,
With white salt tears
Wet on its writhen face;
Ah! let the sea still be mad
And crash in madness among the shaking rocks — 
For the sea is the cry of our sorrow

Millions of men and women have gone off to war and died since Aldington wrote those words. A hundred years have passed. Yet there’s no daylight between me and a long dead warrior poet on where to put our grief. He didn’t know where to put it either. So he put it in the bloody sea.

Last month Lt. Col Paul Hudson (ret) was killed in Australia when the tanker he was flying to put out the brushfires crashed. He was a classmate of mine at Annapolis. He was a friend.

I told my wife that a friend of mine had died in the fires. And that was it. Later as his picture began to circulate over social media, she blurted out, “My God, that’s PC…”

I didn’t remember she knew him too. They were friends. She showed me a picture in an old photo album of the Christmas party she threw 19 years ago. There was 1st Lt Paul Clyde Hudson standing next to 1st Lt Jeremy Graczyk. Two classmates. Two friends. Both no longer with us.

I’d forgotten the party. I’d forgotten they knew her. I’d forgotten them.

I’ve forgotten so much.

We often talk about the impacts of the war on my generation. We talk about the physical wounds. Now, more, we rightfully talk about the invisible ones of PTSD or TBI. But we don’t talk about what’s been lost for my generation of warfighter. A life lived between trips to the sandbox, lived with heads down, slogging our way through the good parts to live through the bad.

It’s not just the grief we don’t know what to do with. It’s the joy. It’s the happiness. And all of life that happens in between.

It’s the cost of 20 years of war.

Brace yourself. It’s Veteran’s Day. And we’re all about to see just how much corporate America appreciates us vets.

From car sales to discount pricing to parking spaces, corporations all over America have agreed. It’s good to honor vets. It may even be profitable. And while I’m genuinely appreciative of the attention and gratitude today brings, I thought it might be a valuable exercise to say out loud what it is that vets really want. And what we in corporate America might do in order to make it happen.

Vets want jobs. Parking spots are nice. Discounts maybe better. But it’s jobs we’re after.

Vets want jobs that make us feel as good about the work we’re doing as serving did; jobs that will build on the experience we have from service, but insist that we develop beyond it. And despite all the open appreciation and appropriate social goodwill we send our vets, in a post industrialized economy where jobs are transitioning into the service or information domains, for many vets, it’s becoming harder for the transition to become a reality.

The armed services are great at making soldiers and sailors. But they’re not great at unmaking them. So it’s up to us, the corporate leaders of America, to take the next steps and give them the opportunities that will make a difference.

Here’s some that I think will help.

1-Set a goal. Anyone around here ever hit a revenue goal they never set? Or one they never measured? Of course not. So why would anyone expect that hiring veterans would be different. Companies that say they are committed to hiring veterans only mean it if they set a goal and hold themselves accountable for doing it. I understand that having a goal means you’ll have to be honest about missing it. And that can be at odds with the outward expression of support for vets. But if you don’t have a hard and fast goal for hiring veterans, you won’t. And the words of support are just words.

2-Make it someone’s job. A wise CEO I worked for once told me that if you want something to work, make it someone’s job to make it work. If a corporation can’t point to the person or organization that is singularly responsible for the growth of veteran hiring, then they don’t mean it. And if headcount is so scarce that they can’t invest in that, then how in the world are they ever going to commit to the investment of hiring veterans?

3-Listen to the vets at your company. A dozen vets in transition a month reach out to me asking about roles at Intuit. There are so many, I have my own screening process.

I try to talk to the persistent ones or the ones whose background I think are a match for my company. And I have lunch with a few every few months that I would like to see if I can’t introduce them to the right folks. The reality is, most aren’t right for the roles we have open. So I don’t ever end up approaching hiring managers on their behalf. But when I do, I do it because I know their background, I’ve met them and I know the role they’re looking at. And that should matter.

The veteran leaders in any corporation know what they’re talking about. And they’re not likely to pass a vet through just because they’re a vet. So when they do, it’s a strong signal that they’re at least due some consideration for the role. They’ve already done more vetting than the silly 30-minute recruiter screening could ever do. So listen to them.

4-Incentivize managers to hire. I once recommended a retiring Command Master Chief with a technical background and a master’s degree in organizational development who I had first person experience working with for a job as an HR business partner. He didn’t get past the recruiter screening. The feedback was that he didn’t have the background.

Like hell you say.

Here’s the honest truth. As a manager, I make a name for myself two ways. By delivering business outcomes. And by attracting top talent. When I lure an elephant away from a Google or a Proctor and Gamble or a big five consulting firm, I get street cred as the sort of leader that can bring in top talent. And when any of those hires don’t work out, it’s viewed as an outlier, not as a mark against my hiring ability.

The hard truth is that vets don’t get hired because hiring managers are afraid to stick their necks out. And they don’t value service the way they value like experience with top firms. And as much as we’d like to culture our way into creating that, the reality is, outside of other veterans, that approach doesn’t scale.

A hiring manager with 100 people in their orgs and no vets should feel the deficiency. And they’ll need some help from the rest of the business to feel it. Hold hiring managers accountable for hiring vets. If you’re not willing to do that, then you don’t mean you have a commitment to hiring vets.

4-Create a community of vets within the organization. They’re out there already. Give them a place to connect. Put someone in charge of it. Make it a valued role. I got a job where I did because one vet that I knew introduced me to another vet at his company that had a job open. Many inputs need to have a place to consolidate into one shared consciousness. Like many things we’ve learned in adjacent domains, community can grow capability. But it won’t grow on it’s own. It takes…here’s that word again…commitment.

5-Educate your talent acquisition team on the skills and experience veterans have. I’m not sure who got the bright idea to try to change military resumes into job titles from corporate America, but it’s a bad one.

I don’t want to see an NCO calling themselves an HR professional because they dealt with people problems or an operations director calling themselves a product manager because they met the demands of the market with a troop deployment package. I know someone’s trying to help. But they’re not. The people that need that translation won’t believe it. And the people who don’t, know it’s nonsense.

So what actually works?

A few months ago, one of the smartest managers I worked with messaged me and did something that, if we’re going to actually get serious about hiring vets, we’ve got to find a way to scale. He sent me a resume. And he asked me what it was that the last job the candidate actually did.

Company Commander was the title.

My translation: He led a team of 150 or so mechanics responsible for the maintenance lifecycle of a few hundred vehicles. And he was responsible for all the training, staffing and equipment required to support it. And he did it in remote areas where he was likely the senior leader accountable for his outcome.

He was hired. Not because I said so. But because the manager now knew that work-back plans, maintenance cycles, management and leadership/judgement were things he walked in the door with. And his interview jumped.

That process, education of those hiring, is critical. It’s not that inherently scalable though. But I bet, if it were someone’s job to figure out how, they could.

Which takes me back to the grand point.

Commitment.

Corporate America knows how to meet the goals we set for ourselves. Hiring vets is no different. Saying that you’re committed to a goal, means exactly what we know it does; investing resources and the accountability that comes with that investment.

Anything less is just talk. And vets deserve better.