Iraq Vets and Social Capital

Here's the piece from "Morning Edition" that I mentioned. The transcript up on the page is incomplete, so I recommend listening to the whole thing - you get to hear the salty old Brooklynese of the VFW hall. A sampling of the stats from the piece:

Young veterans, 20 to 24 years old, have an unemployment rate that's double the national rate. In 2006, it averaged 10.4 percent, compared with a 4.6 percent jobless rate nationally, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The rate for young veterans varies from month to month. In October, it was a low 7 percent. But in September, it was 13.6 percent.)

Kraft is older. He's 34. But in his job search, he has found that employers often don't know what to make of the job experience people get in the military. Kraft says employers look at his resume, see the three years he was in the Army, "and it's like there's a black hole in my resume."

Today, members of the military make up less than 1 percent of the population.