What is Las Vegas like for Veterans?

Everybody has a Las Vegas story. It lasts about three days and it ends at the airport, a little poorer, promising never to drink anything blue again.

That is the city most of the country knows. There is another one wrapped around it, with school zones and swing shifts and a hospital campus out on North Pecos Road. The Census Bureau counts 135,565 Veterans in Clark County in its 2020 to 2024 estimate. None of them are here for the weekend.

In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, seventeen Veterans talked about living here. Some were born in the valley and joined up to get out of it. Some drove in with a U-Haul and a plan. Their verdict, boiled down: the place is easy to love and easy to be alone in, and those are not opposites.

Some of them were already here

Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant, grew up in Las Vegas and did not notice anything unusual about it.

“I didn’t realize it was different till I joined the Marine Corps.”

Hear it at 1:28

His example is not the Strip. It is the 7-Eleven six houses down from the house he grew up in, where a kid could walk out the door and get a chocolate milk whenever he felt like it. He was at Fort Huachuca learning Morse code when it dawned on him that you cannot do that everywhere.

Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, got the other local childhood. His father built a custom home out by Lone Mountain when there was nothing around it but desert.

“By 1995 he lost it all and we were basically homeless for like 10 years.”

Hear it at 4:05

North Las Vegas, the east side, Henderson, a few rounds of Budget Suites. “I went to a different school every year from kindergarten all the way up through high school.” Hear it at 4:41 He left at 17 for the Marine Corps, and he says getting out of Las Vegas was the point. His recruiter found him an earlier ship date with some fine print attached, and the fine print was a reserve unit that drills at Nellis Air Force Base. He enlisted to leave town and the Marine Corps stationed him at home.

Jason Brooks, a medically retired Marine and former Recon and SERE instructor, was born and raised here too, and went in late.

“Being from Vegas, 24, you’re not really an adult. You’re still kind of a kid.”

Hear it at 1:21

And Lucky Lopez, an Army National Guard Veteran, mechanic and car business YouTuber, never saw a reason to go anywhere. “I was born and raised here and I figured I would just continue focusing on what I was doing at the time and opened up a dealership.” Hear it at 8:56 His first lot sat beside the freeway next to a strip club, which in this town counts as a landmark.

Four locals, four different cities. Hold that thought.

The rest picked it

Las Vegas is a place people choose, usually fast.

Rachel Veronica, a U.S. Army Veteran and clinical hypnotherapist, chose it on the merits: “I hate snow. I was tired of living in the cold and dreary Ohio Cleveland weather.” Hear it at 5:49 She decided with a year left on her contract and drove three days from Ohio.

“I got here on the day of my ETS, which was cool.”

Hear it at 6:24

Daniel Coffeen, a U.S. Army Veteran and Ranger School graduate, had no such plan.

“I never planned on living in Vegas.”

Hear it at 39:38

“Within a week, I was like, I’m moving and going just because I saw housing prices and I was like, I bet I could work there.”

Hear it at 39:49

Now he says it is hard to imagine living anywhere else.

Jacob “Stitch” Duran, a U.S. Air Force Veteran who became a cutman in boxing and the UFC, waited on a job transfer and then got two weeks to make it. He gave his school to a student, sold his house at a loss and, by his account, took a pay cut of $25,000 a year.

“I put my family in a U-Haul, drove nine hours to Vegas to the point I called my mom and said, ‘Mom, got a new number.’ It was that quick.”

Hear it at 45:44

Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran and adaptive athlete with Paralyzed Veterans of America, left a steady job in her California hometown.

“About 2010, I wanted to do something different with my life, so I uprooted and came to Vegas.”

Hear it at 3:28

Within months she was in a hospital with cancer on her spine and legs that had stopped working. She did not go home. She plays wheelchair basketball now, and we will come back to her.

Jason Lee Morrison, a Marine Corps Veteran, Recon Marine, writer and poet, had been in town a year when we sat down with him. He tends bar on Water Street and he sounded like a man still surprised by his luck.

“I love the attitude of the people here. I love that there’s a lot of Veterans in this community.”

Hear it at 52:34

Then there is the accidental resident. In one of our earliest interviews, Sarah, an Army Reserve staff sergeant, medic and restaurant co-owner, said she drove down to help a friend whose husband had orders to Nellis. The friend asked her to stay. “If I find a job in 2 weeks, then I’ll stay,” she told her. Hear it at 10:37 It took one week. She married a man who was born here. “I am never leaving this place.” Hear it at 11:03

The base at the edge of town

A lot of Veterans are here because the Air Force sent them and the moving truck never came back. The 99th Air Base Wing is the host for both Nellis and Creech Air Force Bases and, by its own count, supports more than 10,000 people assigned to the two bases and the Nevada Test and Training Range. Creech, according to its own page, hosts “the global Remotely Piloted Aircraft Enterprise.”

Bobi Pike-Oates, a retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant, was in Korea in the early 1990s and headed back to Texas. Then she met Scott, the man she married.

“I extended so I could come back to Nellis after I met Scott, cuz I was headed back to Texas.”

Hear it at 18:39

A few years later she was leading the first Air Force maintainers on a new aircraft called the Predator, at the airfield she calls Indian Springs, an hour each way from Nellis by her count. They worked out of an old trailer.

“We would be up there in the winter, if we had a little frost up at Indian Springs, we’re scraping with our credit cards to get the frost off. In the summer by the afternoon, you couldn’t fly cuz the engines would overheat.”

Hear it at 25:21

Her drive is a history of the valley all by itself.

“We’d go up Craig Road, get on the 95 after you left the Santa Fe Hotel, there was nothing in the Northwest.”

Hear it at 27:45

Now, she says, there are interchanges out to Mount Charleston and houses well past them.

The base hospital shows up in our interviews exactly once, and from an Army guy. “Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, was sent to Nellis by ambulance and left without a gallbladder.

“Big shout out to 99th Medical Group over here at Nellis because they were fantastic.”

Hear it at 1:21:43

He wondered out loud whether he was just a soldier who was not used to people being nice. That is his story and not a map: who can be seen on base is a question for the base.

The cost of living gets a split decision. Coffeen moved for the housing prices. Clayton, an Air Force Veteran and founder of Red Tails Racing, agrees the town is cheap next to other duty stations, and then tells you what cheap still meant on an airman’s pay.

“When I was active duty, I ended up homeless twice while active duty because I couldn’t make enough to pay all of my bills.”

Hear it at 34:52

“That was here in Las Vegas and it’s cheap in Las Vegas in comparison to some duty stations.” Hear it at 35:11

It is not one place

Remember the four locals. Jo MT, a 20 year Air Force bomb loader who now does stand-up, works rooms all over the valley and says newcomers keep making the same mistake. They think Vegas is Vegas.

“You have North Side, you have Summerlin, you have Henderson, and you have to be different at every one of those.”

Hear it at 13:16

Paradise, where the Strip actually is, he leaves to the tourists.

The city also moves while you are standing in it. Tom “Ghost” Martin, a Marine Corps Veteran of Desert Storm, owns The Leatherneck Club on Spring Mountain Road. (Vegas Veteran Voices shares an address with The Leatherneck Club.) The bar did not open in Chinatown. “We established shop and Chinatown grew up around us.” Hear it at 28:37 These days Marines put it on the itinerary between a Raiders game and a show, which Martin calls a blessing and still sounds surprised by.

“I mean, we’re competing against Hoover Dam.”

Hear it at 29:23

You have to know somebody

Here is the part the ranking lists skip. A city where nearly everyone came from somewhere else is friendly and thin at the same time.

Jamie Waterberry, a Veteran who works in corporate philanthropy, got here less than two years before we talked, with the family closing in on its ninth move in sixteen years. What she had heard about Las Vegas was that you need to know somebody to get hired. She did not know anybody.

“So using my GI Bill, I strategically went to UNLV and sought out opportunities that would help me build that career.”

Hear it at 43:29

A free ticket to a campus event led to a conversation, which led to an internship that had not existed until she asked for it.

Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, saw the other outcome during the pandemic, when campus went remote and his student Veterans were sent home to whatever home was.

“It’s one thing if you’re stuck at home with your family, but it’s another thing if you moved here with no family and now you’re stuck in your apartment with no family here and no connection here.”

Hear it at 1:21:23

His students packed groceries at a food pantry on Saturday mornings and hiked three miles every other Saturday, to get people out of the house.

That is the trade. The same thing that lets you show up on your ETS date and start over means nobody is expecting you. Morrison, a year in, said out loud that he wanted to meet more Vegas Veterans and told them where to find him. Adams, with fourteen years, a diagnosis and a wheelchair between her and the day she arrived, put it this way.

“If you’re going through a hard time right now, you’ll still be able to get out of it. Get you some friends, get you some support. It’s here in Vegas. You just got to find it.”

Hear it at 31:40