Tending to the working needs of returning veterans

Sgt. 1st Class Phillip Maas at first aimed for a professional baseball career. Instead, he followed his father into Army green and spent much of his career as a drug investigator for the military police.

In 1992, he went into the Oregon National Guard, and for the past two years has led a program to get veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan back into the civilian work force.

Last Monday, at a Portland Business Alliance conference he helped to organize, Maas urged business owners, educators, health professionals and others to devote more attention to the needs of veterans. He sat down with The Oregonian last week for Five Questions.

1. What are you reading?

I just finished "To Iraq and Back," (by Bridget C. Cantrell and Chuck Dean) and I am re-reading "The Devil's Sandbox" by John Bruning.

And I'm a huge Nelson DeMille fan, as far as on the fiction side. He's a prior service guy who wrote "The General's Daughter." He does a very good job at painting the picture. When you read the fictitious military base when the fictitious crime or event happened, his description is so perfect with things you would only know if you had ever been stationed there, but you know exactly what post he's talking about.

2. Would you go to Iraq?

Yes, I would say absolutely without hesitation. I will tell you my 11-year-old says, "Absolutely not, Dad, there's no reason for you to go there, and I don't think any of our other guys ought to be there either." But having said that, I'm not necessarily itching (to go). I've never seen myself as a warrior in search of a war.

3. What is the biggest misconception that returning veterans have about the society they left?

People don't understand how much or how far-reaching the things that they say on TV or in the print media against the war effort really hit them.

So when (the returning soldiers) land, they expect all of this counter- or anti-war stuff. I get a huge kick when we move a group from Fort Lewis. Their mind-set is, "Hey, it's us against the world, I just spent 18 months in Iraq." And when they come down I-5 across the Glenn Jackson Bridge being led by 125 motorcycles from the Patriot Guard and the rest of the groups, and to see people standing on overpasses, it is the coolest feeling because you can see in their eyes that the mind-set has just changed.

4. What transition issues do veterans have in returning to the work force?

At times you see a certain amount of restlessness. They're worth more, just based on experience-wise and maturity-wise. But maybe they worked at a fast-food place, maybe they worked at a convenience store before that. In other words, they didn't see themselves doing that job for 10 years anyway. But the idea of going back and doing that after being in Iraq for 18 months, they say: "Hey I'm different. I'm not the same person that I was before." And I think that's probably our biggest thing.

5. Have you ever had a jarring transition?

This is going sound dumb, but I think it's when I went from playing minor-league baseball to walking into an Army recruiter's office. Even though I had grown up in it, I had always been very shielded. I was an officer's kid. I was a star athlete in high school. When I got tired of playing minor-league baseball for the Chicago Cubs, I walked into a recruiter's office and said, you know what? I've got to take control of my life, and it has to be me. The day I went to basic training and I had a guy right up in my grill six inches away and just calling me every name in the book, reading me the riot act; I would say that was pretty darn earth shattering.

Anne Saker: 503/294-7656; annesaker@news.oregonian.com