I’ve been retired from work for more than two years, but since I still serve on three boards of directors and participate on a number of disability advocacy committees, I wake up most mornings with that “work-to-do” list in my head. I often wonder why.

Some of my work ethic has to do with the environment that I grew up in. Click here to take action on this issueMy dad worked two full-time jobs for 22 years, and while I only saw him on weekends throughout grade school, high school and college, he was a fantastic father. My older brother and I loved and respected him despite seeing him just two days a week. Looking back, I think it was because we knew how hard he worked so that we could go to college.

When I was a kid, as soon as she could trust me to come home from school and not burn our little house down, my mom went back to work, too.

At 11, I began to earn my keep by delivering newspapers in my Long Island neighborhood. At 14, I was caddying at a public golf course; at 16, stacking shelves at a local, now-defunct supermarket; at 18 and in college, behind the cash register or delivering prescriptions for a drugstore; and at 21 near the end of my journey through college, toiling at a liquor store. There were summer jobs, too—mowing lawns, delivering boxes of computer cards at a factory to ladies whose job title was “keypunch operator,” and even a stint at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, first selling tickets to the Swiss Sky Ride, then admitting visitors to a film at the Abbott Laboratories Exhibit.

Beyond college and a year in the Marine Corps came my spinal cord injury at the sixth cervical vertebrae. I spent three months in acute care at a Naval hospital and over a year undergoing physical rehabilitation at a VA Medical Center. I learned a great deal there, perhaps 90% of what I needed to know to live from a wheelchair in the real world. The rest I had to experience on my own.

Part of the “rest” turned out to be restlessness. I wasn’t out of the VA two months when I became totally bored. So, I drove over to a local university with a growing reputation of good accessibility for students with disabilities and academic excellence. I paid a visit to the chairman of the English Department, and explained that I thought I would like to become an English teacher if he would let me into the Master of Arts in English Literature program. He responded, “earn a B or better grade in a summer school course and we’ll admit you.”

I got that B and I completed the course work in two years, thanks to the funding I received from the VA Vocational Rehabilitation Program. Then I got married and started working part-time in housing advocacy for a disabled veterans organization, then as a part-time teacher of Freshman English at a local community college—all the while re-writing my required Master’s thesis three times to finally earn that degree six years after I started.

I retired after working for 36 years. One might say that I had a leg up on other disabled vets because I had an undergraduate degree before my paralysis. It would be difficult to argue against that fact, were it not for the self-discipline I learned by achieving the graduate degree without someone looking over my shoulder.

Getting that advanced degree while teaching Freshman English also simply made me a better writer—a skill that I used over and over again in my work life, and that I continue to use in service to three nonprofit organizations.

And in working as a disability advocate, one simply needs to convert the opposition over and over again about the need for, and the righteousness of, the issue on the table. My education taught me how to persuade people to see the importance of better programs for veterans with disabilities and for all persons with disabilities.

Let’s all remember, with appropriate job training or further education, there is no reason why our troops returning form Iraq or Afghanistan should not have the opportunity to work.

Just the facts: VetsFirst believes that employment opportunities should be available to all of our nation’s veterans. That’s why VetsFirst supports the Veteran Employment Transition Act of 2010 (H.R. 5400/S. 3398). This legislation would increase employment opportunities for our nation’s veterans by allowing employers to bypass the present certification process to receive the Work Opportunity Tax Credit. Instead, the legislation would allow documentation from the Department of Defense to satisfy the certification process. The legislation also includes provisions to ensure that servicemembers are educated about the credit and the process that employers must follow to claim the credit. Let your members of Congress know that you support this legislation too.