Editor’s Note: This is appears in the May 17-30 print edition of the Norwood News. It is the third story in a series exploring the issue of unemployment in the Bronx: Part 1, Part 2.

By the end of the summer, some 23,000 American troops will return home from Afghanistan as part of President Obama’s plan to withdraw forces steadily over the next two years and end the war there by 2014.

These men and women will come home to parents, spouses and children. Some will come home to find jobs, and other won’t. Those returning to the Bronx will come home to the highest unemployment rate in the state — 13.6 percent in March, according to the State Labor Department.

Veterans face a number of challenges when it comes to securing a job after returning home, experts say, and new veterans tend to have a higher unemployment rate than the general population. According to a U.S. Senate report published last spring, 15.2 percent of the population that served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were unemployed in 2010, compared to 8.6 percent of the general population that was unemployed at that same time.

“I think the barriers are very dependent on the type of veteran, but one common denominator is the transition part — being in the military, and then transitioning back into civilian employment,” said Fredy Tello, a former marine who now directs a veterans employment program for the Jericho Project, a nonprofit that operates two supportive housing residences for former service members in the Bronx.

According to a report by New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, approximately 39,855 veterans call the Bronx home. In 2009, 2,909 of those veterans — or just over 7 percent — were out of work.

For some veterans, the skills they learned in service do not translate easily into civilian jobs, according to Tim Hendrickson, director of veteran services at Fedcap, a nonprofit that provides vocational training and job placement services in the Bronx and across the city.

“Tank drivers and infantrymen, they’re really at a disadvantage, because what they were paid to do in the military is take the fight to the enemy,” Hendrickson said. “There’s no enemy when they’re back in the civilian world, so what do they do now?”

Other veterans who served in more translatable lines when deployed — soldiers who worked in communications, for example — sometimes just need a hand transitioning into the civilian job market.

“It takes kind of a middleman to take a look at these resumes, these qualifications, and say, ‘This is how you would word this on the other side. This is how you would frame this in an interview,’” Hendrickson said.

For some returning home, the problem can be larger than how they style their resume.

“There are the social issues,” Tello said. “Some of them encounter obstacles in their lives.”

A 2011 survey from the nonprofit RAND Corporation and the New York State Health Foundation found that 22 percent of the state’s veterans have a probable diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or major depression, disorders that can disrupt a stable transition back to civilian life if left untreated.

Hendrickson, who served two deployments in Iraq and spent five years as an army captain, returned home to upstate New York and at first, thought navigating the job market would be easy, something he says a lot of new veterans think.

“You come out with this pride: ‘I’ve served in Iraq, I’ve served in Afghanistan, I’ve accomplished things that most of my peers won’t accomplish in their lifetimes,’” he said. “But then you spiral down into, why can’t I find a job? Why is this so difficult? Why was I able to achieve so much in the military but I can’t achieve it in the civilian world?”

When Hendrickson lost his first civilian job in the 2008 economic crash, it was the start of a “three year tailspin of unemployment, underemployment, working for wages that were half of what I was making before,” he said. He was suffering from symptoms of PTSD, so he sought mental health counseling.

“Slowly but surely, things turned around for me,” he said.

The key for many veterans, experts say, is knowing when to ask for help, and taking advantage of all the resources that are available to assist them.

“[Some] veterans do have post-traumatic stress, clinical depression, other mental health issues,” said Jericho Project Director Tori Lyon. “The flip side of that is that those issues are, to a great extent, very treatable. It doesn’t prevent a person from being gainfully employed or from being a great employee.”

Lyon said part of the issue is dispelling some of the mental health stigmas associated with returning soldiers, and showing potential employers that the training and skills learned in the armed forces — diligence, punctuality, striving for excellence — make most service members exceptional workers.

“A lot of employers are really stepping up and saying, wow, I would be really lucky to hire a veteran,” she said.

To learn more about the Jericho Project’s Veterans Initiative, call (646) 624-2341 or visit www.jerichoproject.org. To learn more about Fedcap’s veterans services, contact Tim Hendrickson at (212) 727-4227, or visit www.fedcap.org.