VENTURA COUNTY NEWS : Life After Service No Smooth Sailing for Navy Veterans : Military: Retiring personnel sometimes find their experience doesn’t easily transfer to jobs in the civilian sector, but workshops are helping to ease the transition.

Gone is the special parking space. The boxes are packed at one of the choicest pieces of residential real estate in Ventura County. The spacious office just a few blocks away belongs to someone else.

Capt. Stephen Beal, the former commander of Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station, is now just Steve.

After 26 years in the Navy, Beal has decided that it’s time to retire, but is still wondering what the future holds.

“My wife and I are at the stage in which we’re asking, ‘Where to next?’ ” said Beal, 48. “We’ve always been able to answer that question, but for now we just have to leave the response blank.”

Well, not quite blank. Beal’s name has been mentioned prominently among the short list of contenders for the county chief administrative officer post being vacated this month by Lin Koester.

But the competition is stiff, and he knows he may well be facing a daunting job search after he moves out this week. It’s a strange transition for a man who never had a job interview, never had to write a resume, and never had to choose a suit for work.

Beal has been in the Navy since he was a young man. He was embraced by a system that takes pride in caring for its members in a family-like way.

But retiring military men and women, once they reach their 30s, 40s and 50s, find themselves in a spot similar to that of recent college graduates, peering out from a safe haven into a future that is in some ways as alien as any foreign deployment.

Since the end of the Cold War, cost-cutting has sent thousands of military members out of the womb of the service.

A private Washington think tank--the Society for Human Resources Management--reports that 896,000 veterans were discharged from the military between 1994 and 1997, many after serving one tour of duty.

In the early days of the winnowing of the force, in the early 1990s, the military branches often sent men and women out ill-equipped to face a recession economy and a civilian world that may seem as chaotic as the military was ordered. Now, the military insists that it has figured out how to make that transition more bearable.

“There was shock and anger when the downsizing started after the Gulf War. People didn’t know it would happen,” said Mary-Jean Owens, manager of the transition program at Point Mugu and the Port Hueneme Seabee base. “We do better now.”

A World Apart

Transition assistance, mandated by Congress in the late 1980s, has built slowly into a program with a much larger scope, Owens said.

“I think they’re doing a lot more than they did six years ago,” said Mack Hardaway, Beal’s former second-in-command, who retired last week and has taken a job with the Ross chain of clothing stores. “It’s not fair to take people who have given a chunk of their lives and give them no guidance whatsoever, which is what was happening for a long time.”

And sailors often need the help.

“In the military we’d just get in the pecking order. Someone in Washington is making the decisions,” said Barry Bratton, who retired from Point Mugu last year and now supervises operations at the airport in Truckee near Lake Tahoe. “In a company it’s much more personal. The little things matter more.”

Both socially and physically, the Navy is a world apart from the rest of society. Navy bases, Point Mugu and Port Hueneme among them, are virtual islands unto themselves, fenced in by barbed wire and guarded gates. Crime and drug use are very low. Homelessness is something that occurs across the fence.

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In many cases, housing is provided. All one’s shopping can be done on base. Most military members move so frequently that they never bond with the surrounding community.

By contrast, civilian life can look like a combat zone.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1997 veterans who left the service saw an 11.8% unemployment rate in their transition year, compared with 4% in the rest of the work force.

Whites in their first year out of the military earn about 10% less than their civilian counterparts, until they nearly catch up 10 to 15 years later, according to research by Joshua Angrist, a professor of economics at MIT. Black veterans make about the same amount as their civilian counterparts, taking into account the lower earnings of blacks in general.

So their experience doesn’t count for much, Angrist said. “The military wouldn’t say this, but it’s like being in jail.”

The view that military experience is worthless in the civilian world makes retiring sailors bristle.

Many officers, whose specialties have been management and leadership, have trouble transferring those skills to the civilian sector.

That’s where Dennis Didier, who runs a monthly transition seminar at Port Hueneme, comes in. He teaches sailors how to sell themselves.

In a bland conference room at the Seabee base, the ruddy, compact man with a jokey drill-sergeant delivery addresses a group he knows is terrified of what they’ll find after leaving the service.

“The biggest problem is credibility,” Didier tells his listeners. So they have to sell their experience to recruiters, he said. But sailors are a modest lot, used to being trailed by a file listing their accomplishments. They must learn to brag.

“You need to tell him [that when] you’re flying at hundreds of miles an hour, if you screw up, big smoking holes happen,” he said.

In many ways, Didier reminds them the military has become just another big corporation, one of mergers and downsizing. The major difference is, if you don’t like your civilian job you can leave.

For civilian employers, say Navy counselors, vets should be ideal candidates.

Military members have all the Boy Scout attributes. They’re thrifty, loyal, brave. They’re more likely to be in shape, drug-free and ready to work, Owens said.

Companies are increasingly knocking on the bases’ doors.

The Gulf War “changed employers’ mentalities,” said Gloria Smith, a corporate liaison at the Seabee base. “Where once [military members] were perceived as a little too strict or regimented, people then saw them returning and running to hug their kids. They said, ‘Gosh, these are family people.’ ”

Plus, they can come cheap.

Many officers with years of experience have hefty pensions. It’s not enough to maintain their levels of spending, but it is enough so they can live on modest wages.

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After years of knowing that they are headed somewhere, finding themselves with a hazy future can be frightening.

“There was a psychological change,” said ex-Point Mugu sailor Jerry Netko, who took several months to find a job at General Electric in Maine. “Around the fourth or fifth month I was beginning to wonder if anybody wanted me.”

But even after landing a job, civilian life has its stresses. Like new college graduates, military veterans often change jobs three times within five years, Owens said.

“It’s a culture shock, this transformation of going from a tightknit community to one where you’re out on your own,” said Will Brunet, who retired last year from Point Mugu and is now a pilot based in San Antonio.

Though sailors are loath to admit unhappiness, many will say they miss the structure and respect of military life.

Owens’ father retired from the military after 22 years, and she noticed an emotional change in him as he attempted to fit in.

“The transition process tore us apart. The community didn’t know us,” she said.

A New Mind-Set

Perhaps hardest of all is not being part of an organization that has seen them through most of their adult lives.

“For me, I took my uniform off, but I still have it hanging in the closet,” said Netko. “I will not take anything off it, because in some ways it’s still a part of me.”

The newly retired often have to remind themselves that they’re civilians.

For Beal and his family, wife Sharon and grown daughters Tosha and Tamara, the change entails a new mind-set.

Beal’s been a helicopter pilot. He’s been the smooth-talking virtual mayor of a naval base. Now he could be a top county administrator.

“My daughter told me the other day, ‘We’ve only known you as a Navy man,’ ” he said. “It’s going to be a little like starting over.”