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23V Recon - creating a better "glide path" for vets to re-enter civilian life

Spend enough time in a war zone where all the enemy combatants are dressed like civilians, and you learn to trust no one but your team.

Which means that things that used to be fun, like hockey games or concerts, instead become exercises in hypervigilance.

Mike Waldron knows.  The combat vet suffered daily panic attacks for years after he got home.  You've conditioned and trained your brain, he says, and that conditioning doesn't go away just because you get on a plane and come home.

Now the program that Waldron, founder and executive director of 23rd Veteran, developed to create  "a glide path" for veterans to re-enter civilian life, may be poised to go national.

Mike Waldron and Dexter

Mike Waldron is perfectly frank that his approach to help veterans retrain their brains "stays away from the touchy-feely," but perhaps he makes one exception: his British lab, Dexter.

Dexter has not only made a big difference to Mike, he visits veterans center (including the one at UMD), VA hospitals and even toured Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.  There, Dexter got to spend some time with a recently - and gravely - wounded soldier, eliciting the man's first smile since he was wounded.

Dexter soaks up some snuggles with students at UMD's Veterans Services Center

Lisa Johnson started her broadcast career anchoring the television news at her high school and spinning country music at KWWK/KOLM Radio in Rochester, Minnesota. She was a reporter and news anchor at KTHI in Fargo, ND (not to mention the host of a children's program called "Lisa's Lane") and a radio reporter and anchor in Moorhead, Bismarck, Wahpeton and Fergus Falls.Since 1991, she has hosted Northland Morning on KUMD. One of the best parts of her job includes "paying it forward" by mentoring upcoming journalists and broadcasters on the student news team that helps produce Northland Morning. She also loves introducing the different people she meets in her job to one another, helping to forge new "community connections" and partnerships.Lisa has amassed a book collection weighing over two tons, and she enjoys reading, photography, volunteering with Animal Allies Humane Society and fantasizing about farmland. She goes to bed at 8pm, long before her daughter, two cats, or three dogs.
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