What jobs do Veterans actually get after the military?

For twenty years Edward Haines listened to other people’s radios for the Marine Corps. Then he retired, went back to school, and one day, poking around a kinesiology department website, learned that the person who runs onto the field when a kid goes down has a job title.

“I actually had no clue this was a job I could do.”

Hear it at 1:03:53

Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant who spent 20 years in signals intelligence, now works as an athletic trainer. He tapes ankles at a high school. It was not on any list anyone handed him on the way out.

You have seen those lists. Ten Best Careers for Veterans. Logistics. Cybersecurity. Project management, which is the civilian word for “was a sergeant.” We do not have a list. We have fourteen Veterans, in interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, telling us what they actually ended up doing and the exact, usually stupid, way it happened.

First, the numbers

Most Veterans are working. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its yearly report on Veterans’ employment, put Veteran unemployment at 3.5 percent for 2025, under the 4.2 percent for people who never served. The same report says 16.2 percent of employed Veterans who served since September 2001 worked for the federal government. For everyone else it was 2.1 percent.

So a lot of people trade one government ID card for another. What a table cannot tell you is how anybody got from the DD-214 to the desk, the truck or the football field. That part is all story.

The first job is not the job

Randy Nichols, a Navy Veteran and electronics technician, got out in 2015. His opening months as a civilian were not a straight line.

“I took two months off after I got out and I had three jobs. In that two months, right? Because I tried something, didn’t like it, moved on to the next thing.”

Hear it at 37:11

Bruce Cardenas, a Marine Corps Veteran who went on to the LAPD, knew exactly what he wanted. The LAPD took a year to finish checking his background. In the meantime he had rent, so he answered a newspaper ad for a brand new Mitsubishi dealership and walked in with a high and tight.

“I said, ‘I’ve never sold anything in my life.’ He said, ‘Well, you seem like a really nice kid. When can you start?’”

Hear it at 14:42

He started that day. By his own account he was the top salesman on the lot for eleven months without knowing much about the cars. When a customer asked a hard question he said that was a good question and they went and found out together.

Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran and adaptive athlete, had a plan that made complete sense. She drove trucks for the Army. She would drive trucks.

“I wanted to transfer my trucking license to civilian, but I found out early that I couldn’t do that.”

Hear it at 2:37

She went into security work for the county instead.

Erik Schreiner, a Marine Corps Veteran, spent years doing what there was.

“I did a lot of stuff. Mostly a lot of maintenance. Auto mechanics, industrial maintenance, things like that.”

Hear it at 7:08

And Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, got talked into selling solar panels in Northern California. The commission numbers looked great on paper. Nobody mentioned he would have to find his own customers.

“I start door knocking, but at the time, my head’s still shaved. I got a scar on my face. I’m knocking on people’s doors.”

Hear it at 34:46

It took him a month to see the flaw in the business model. He was living in his car, eating ravioli out of the can, when he had the thought that turned him around.

“I know how to work hard. I know how to sacrifice. I’m disciplined. I should do something that I like to do.”

Hear it at 35:09

He drove home to Las Vegas and spent a year doing as much stand-up as the city would let him.

Another uniform, or none ever again

The BLS number about government work has faces. Cardenas got the Christmas Eve phone call telling him he had squeaked through the background check, and reported to the police academy in January 1988. The dealership owner had offered to make him general manager inside six months. He passed.

“No, it’s not really about the money. It’s really what I want to do.”

Hear it at 16:40

He is not sentimental about the profession. Departments hire from the human race, he says, and some people get through who should not. Then, with no pause:

“Best job I ever had in my life.”

Hear it at 17:41

AJ Kehl, an Air Force Veteran, was a firefighter for his whole career in uniform, and Jennifer Marshall, a Navy Veteran, became a firefighter EMT after hers. Adams says part of what she liked about security was that it came with the same clothes every day.

Delvin Bourn, a U.S. Army Veteran and 82nd Airborne paratrooper, went the other direction as fast as a truck would take him. When he got out he had offers. He wanted a cab with one seat in it.

“I can be by myself, drive at night, don’t have to be around people, and I really enjoyed that. And I thought that’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life.”

Hear it at 7:47

Then there are the people whose resumes do not sort into either pile. Tarek “Joey Nobody” Kadourah, a U.S. Army Veteran and former intelligence contractor, has worked for an NFL team, for a celebrity, for immigration enforcement and for child protective services in Las Vegas. Ask him which one was the good one.

“Looking back throughout my career, I was the happiest and most content when I was working with kids.”

Hear it at 40:13

The trades

Evelyn Pacheco, a U.S. Army Veteran, is Nevada’s first Black female union plumber. That was not the plan either.

“I wanted to be a cop when I first got in military.”

Hear it at 11:41

She missed the run time, she says, by a sixteenth of a second. They told her she was out.

“Oh, okay. So, what else am I going to do?”

Hear it at 11:55

Years later, out of the Army, with three kids, she got into the plumbers and pipefitters apprenticeship. Anyone who thinks the trades are the easy road should hear her describe it.

“It’s a five-year apprenticeship. So five years, you go to school at two nights a week at night.”

Hear it at 7:14

Around that, six-day weeks and whatever shift the job needed, as a single parent.

“It was all on me and it was hard. I’m not going to say that it’s easy.”

Hear it at 7:48

What was on the other side, in her words: “To end up to making 100,000 a year was huge.”

Hear it at 8:31

She now runs Nevada Women in Trades, and the thing she tells people about apprenticeships is to never apply for just one.

“If you apply for all of them and as many apprenticeships, four or five as you can, then you got choices.”

Hear it at 38:07

Nichols got to plumbing by a side door. In the Navy he soldered resistors the size of a grain of rice onto circuit cards. He wanted to keep working with his hands.

“I got a job at a hospital and they didn’t have a plumber. So I kind of just fell into that, ended up liking it, came and took a class and now I teach plumbing.”

Hear it at 25:46

He taught himself for six years before his bosses told him to go get certified. He used his GI Bill for the class. VA has a page on using the GI Bill for on-the-job training and apprenticeships, which is where the actual rules live.

The job nobody told you existed

Go back to Haines and the ankle tape. A surprising number of these stories turn on a job the Veteran did not know was a job.

Schreiner loved off-roading. He volunteered with off-road groups for years while the maintenance work paid the bills.

“I was volunteering, but how can I get paid to do it?”

Hear it at 6:19

Then he saw a listing for a Jeep tour guide. He did not send a resume.

“I just showed up, knocked on the door, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m the guy you need to hire. This is what I do.’”

Hear it at 6:35

Caitlin Duffy, a U.S. Army Veteran and 50 cal gunner, got out faster than she expected and called the one professional she had gotten to know as a civilian: the man who had handled her mortgage. She asked him whether she should go back to college. He told her to come answer his phones. She started three days later and stayed with the company almost ten years.

“It was not my goal originally to be a mortgage lender. I actually always thought that I would never be in sales.”

Hear it at 10:46

Jacob “Stitch” Duran, a U.S. Air Force Veteran, picked up martial arts while stationed in Thailand in the 1970s. Then he came home and did something sensible for a very long time.

“I was working for R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, company that makes Winstons, the Salems, Camels, and had a real nice job with them for 23 years.”

Hear it at 44:31

He trained fighters on the side the whole time. Eventually he moved to Las Vegas to work corners, and one night at a kickboxing card a man he knew from the gyms asked for his business card. The man had just bought the UFC. Duran became a cutman in boxing and the UFC. Twenty-three years of cigarettes came first.

Marshall, the firefighter EMT, is also an actress, and she talks about that line of work without any glitter on it. She spent her early days in Hollywood meeting people and working for free.

“It is a career where you can do everything right, and it’s not linear. Maybe you’ll make no headway.”

Hear it at 42:09

Is it hard to get a good one?

Here our guests do not agree, and they are looking at the same job market.

Jason Lee Morrison, a USMC Veteran and Recon Marine, had the big defense industry job and lost it.

“When you get out of the military, it’s really hard to get plugged into a good job sometimes.”

Hear it at 46:31

The way he sees it, a lot of people end up at a big-box store, or become a cop, or move to Washington for contracting work, when what they wanted was to go back to their hometown and pick up where they left off.

Kehl, who had more than 22 years in the Air Force and was two months from his retirement date when we talked, had been taking every interview he could get just to learn the terrain. He came away with the opposite read.

“We are very marketable. We come with great experience, education, and these soft skills that I think a lot of these big companies are looking for.”

Hear it at 39:22

Both can be true. A retiring chief with a degree and a Marine going home to a small town are not shopping in the same store.

How they actually got there

Line the fourteen up and count how many found their work through a job board, a transition class or a list of best careers. We get zero.

A dealership owner liked his haircut. A mortgage lender needed someone on the phones. A hospital did not have a plumber. A man at a kickboxing card asked for a card. A Marine knocked on a door and announced himself. Cardenas, who has changed careers more than once, says it flat:

“Everything in my life has been relationships.”

Hear it at 14:53

The other thing they share is the miss. Pacheco’s sixteenth of a second. Adams’s license. D’Angelo’s solar panels. Nichols’s three jobs in two months. Nearly every one of them was aimed at something else first.

Haines found his on a department website, twenty years of service behind him. He is the one taping the ankles now.