In October, I was invited to a lunch at a downtown Raleigh hotel for the Veterans Life Center, which is in Butner, next to the state mental health complex. I was not familiar with the VLC, despite writing about the military and veterans for the last seven years.
There are a lot of veterans groups in North Carolina, with 95,000 active-duty service members and more than 600,000 veterans living here.
The invitation showed that the NC Chamber’s CEO, Gary Salamido, would be participating in the event. Speakers included U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis and Gov. Josh Stein, which got my attention.
The lunch was the kickoff of the center’s two-year initiative to connect veterans with North Carolina’s business community, funded by a $750,000-grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The focus would be getting veterans about to leave the military into the SkillBridge Program, which is a Department of Defense program that places service members with employers at no cost to the business, for up to six months. The service members continue to receive military pay. It is a smart program intended to get transitioning veterans into good careers.
But I felt like there was more to this story than the SkillBridge initiative. I went to Butner to learn more, and about John Turner, the center’s founder and executive director.
His single-minded effort after combat in Iraq to help veterans in trouble is the reason we were at the lunch. Over the past 15 years, he has impressed many influential folks who have helped turn his vision into a 50-room residential facility, which opened in 2020.
TURNER’S JOURNEY
The vast majority of veterans are not homeless, dealing with addiction, or in jail. But enough are, and folks want to help them. Turner’s idea was to go beyond stabilizing them, to helping them achieve success.
He is a big, gregarious fellow who grew up in Indiana. Neither of his parents graduated college; their goal was that their children would do so.
But Turner was not headed for college in the early ‘90s. By his own description, he was “not a great high school student.” He told me his story while we were sitting in a spacious conference room at the VLC, a 40,000-square-foot facility that cost about $8 million. Much of the funding came from a $7.8 million federal Housing and Urban Development grant.
“If you would go back and ask any high school teacher I had, ‘Who do you think created a multi- million-dollar innovative non-profit with the support of U.S. senators and a governor?’ I don’t think my name would have been at the top of their list.”
Turner joined the Coast Guard, serving from 1992 to 1996. Then he went to college, graduating from Purdue and, eventually, gained an Army commission through ROTC. “I lost my focus on ROTC and was suspended from the program,” he says. Turner had more work to do at Fort Lewis in Washington state to finish up ROTC. “My life is full of struggles, resiliency, resolve, achievement,” he explains.
When he joined the Army in early 2003, the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq, and in 2005, Turner deployed to Mosul with the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
This is from a 20-year-old story in the Los Angeles Times, written by war correspondent Robert Kaplan:
Throughout Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become veritable mayors of micro-regions, meeting with local sheiks, setting up waste-removal programs to employ young men, dealing with complaints about cuts in electricity and so on. They have learned to arbitrate tribal politics, to speak articulately and to sit through endless speeches without losing patience.
I watched Lt. John Turner of Indianapolis get up on his knees from a carpet while sipping tea with a former neighborhood mukhtar and plead softly: “Sir, I am willing to die for a country that is not my own. So will you resume your position as mukhtar? Brave men must stand forward. Iraq’s wealth is not oil but its civilization. Trust me by the projects I bring, not by my words.”
Turner, a D student in high school, got straightened out as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard before earning a degree from Purdue and becoming an Army officer. He is one of what Col. Michael Shields, commander of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Mosul, calls his “young soldier-statesmen.”
Is it any wonder that when Turner got out of the Army as a captain in 2007, he wanted to do something substantial?
‘I’VE GOT THIS PLAN’
While working in South and North Carolina for John McCain’s unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign, Turner made influential Republican friends, particularly in the Raleigh area. He was practically broke, doing sales with side catering gigs. No matter. He had an idea for a nonprofit that would build a residential facility for veterans needing many services to get on their feet: training, healthcare, spiritual guidance, financial literacy.
He got invited to speak at a Wake County Republican club, hoping to collect the $1,200 needed to create a 501(c)(3). He raised $1,400. An attendee that night was then-N.C. Rep. Marilyn Avila, who wrote a check and connected him to Thom Tillis, who had just become speaker of the N.C. House.
At the October luncheon, Tillis recalled the meeting.
“Marilyn Avila knew this guy that wanted to talk about some veterans project. And so we scheduled it in my office and in comes Marilyn and John Turner. He says, ‘I’ve got this plan, this plan for a Veterans Life Center.’ He’s going through the whole thing. When he got finished I said, ‘John, you’ve got an idea. You don’t have a plan. I think it’s a very compelling idea, but I’m an execution guy. Now, put some meat on the bones and get back in touch with me. We’ll see what we can do to help.’”
And Turner did. Tillis proved instrumental in getting the federal grant. “Without him,” says Turner, “that didn’t happen.”
CARRYING PEOPLE
There is a short video on the Veterans Life Center website that describes the experience of Kyle Harris, an Army veteran of Iraq who turned to drugs to cope with memories of combat. Five years ago, he was homeless, suffering from PTSD, in trouble with the law and estranged from his family.
“He was here two years,” says Turner. “He came to us on a judicial deferment program. He left here a Dallas Herring award winner.”
The Herring award goes to an outstanding student in the NC Community College System. Harris won it for his work as a student in Vance-Granville Community College’s Automotive Systems Technology program. The award is given to the student who best embodies Herring’s philosophy of “taking people where they are and carrying them as far as they
can go.”
Which is also a good way to describe the Veterans Life Center. ■
