Over two decades of war, U.S. military personnel overseas looked over the rubble, devastated fields and torn houses and saw opportunity.
One tasted tea for the first time during his broadcast; another was taken by flip flops made from combat boots. Female soldiers got to know women in Afghanistan and imagined economically stronger lives for them. An army helicopter pilot came back sick from being exposed to burning plastic and changed his view of the environment.
Many veterans have gone out on their own, taking advantage of small business programs to build companies inspired by their combat experiences and calibrated to address social or economic problems in the countries where they operate.
Nick Kesler, a veteran advocate who once ran a nonprofit consulting firm dedicated to supporting these kinds of implementation-inspired businesses, said the veterans behind them “know the true costs of instability and conflict to the families they want to support.” .”
“These companies create a connection for them between their uniformed life abroad and now their civilian life at home,” he said.
Below are the stories of four such companies.
Growing up in Louisiana, Brandon Friedman had only tried iced tea and thought it was “the grossest thing ever.”
“My idea of tea was British ladies with big hats,” he recalls.
His first real tea drinking was in Iraq with Kurdish fighters wearing AK-47 bandoleers. It was one of the many eye-opening moments for him during deployments to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taste aside, drinking tea in Iraq meant “stopping and slowing down,” said Mr. Friedman. “It was a way to remove yourself from everyday life.”
Back in Dallas in 2004, he rummaged through halal supermarkets for brown bags of loose leaf tea. Life went on, with marriage, graduate school, a child, a job in politics. “I left the war and left the tea in the past.”
In 2016, Mr. Friedman to investigate the origin of the tea he enjoyed. (The Ceylon black tea he had in Iraq came from Sri Lanka and other countries.) He soon began exploring how to import tea from former conflict zones. His tea education began in earnest, when he learned about the smell and mouthfeel of each type.
Working with a non-profit and seeking funds on Kickstarter, in 2017 he and an army buddy — a former Green Beret — launched Rakkasan Tea Company in a 250-square-foot office space at the back of a small building, importing from Nepal, Colombia. , Vietnam and other countries whose tea is hard to find in US stores. They now have a 2,000-square-foot facility with a storefront and ship 45 teas from nine countries.
Reporting from Afghanistan
There have been challenges. In Vietnam, for example, the 300- and 400-year-old wild tea trees that grow in the mountains and forests of the northern provinces of Ha Giang and Yen Bai are difficult to manage.
Some vendors “are much more casual about timelines,” he said, and have been hard-pressed to meet holiday sales schedules. However, the biggest problems arise when post-conflict countries such as Myanmar and Ethiopia “go back into countries with current conflict”. On top of that, of course, came the supply chain challenges posed by the pandemic.
Selling tea has become an extension of his military mission, said Mr. Friedman, who still prefers the Ceylon tea he first drank in Iraq. “I remain convinced that the way out of conflict is through people talking and trading,” he said. “We call this peace through trade.”
Emily Miller recalls the first deployment to the military in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, when the US military finally realized how culturally inappropriate it was to allow male soldiers to walk through villages and talk to women and children. In 2011, she joined a team tasked with involving “the other 50 percent of the population that has been pretty much largely ignored.”
She ended her two broadcasts “quite disillusioned with the war effort and how we weren’t making a difference.” She believed that business could be a more effective force for the better. Soon, Ms. Miller was at Harvard Business School and had a Skype conversation with a classmate, Kim Jung, and a third friend, Keith Alaniz. Everyone on the line was an army veteran who had cycled through Afghanistan.
Mr. Alaniz told his friends about his second tour in Maidan Wardak province, and meeting Hajji Joseph, a saffron farmer eager to enter the US market.
The three friends started brewing saffron together. They wondered if they could connect farmers with restaurants in the United States. They talked about starting a business that could improve economic conditions in rural Afghanistan.
A 2014 trip to Afghanistan, where the three farmers met, sealed their plan to create Rumi Spice, Ms Jung said. (Later, they added Carol Wang, a citizen who spoke to Dari, to the mix.)
“When the saffron entered the room,” Ms. Jung recalled of their visit, “it just filled the room with this amazing scent that I thought any chef would swoon over.” But it came in a cardboard box wrapped in twine, heralding years of work to educate local students and farmers about U.S. packaging and food safety standards and to centralize processing in the region, which had never been done before.
Rumi Spice has since trained nearly 4,000 local women to work in the processing and fulfillment centers, some of whom are receiving a salary for their labor for the first time.
The team was careful not to align themselves with the Americans or the Afghan government they supported, which proved prescient.
Even after the breakup of the country’s government last year, Rumi Spice — now with 12 products in 1,800 stores across the United States — continues to employ thousands of women and farmers.
During his broadcasts in Iraq, Chris Videau couldn’t help but notice all the garbage. There were piles of them everywhere and a black haze of pollution darkened the sky. Downstairs hung the stench of burning plastic.
The army’s fire pits—gigantic garbage dumps ignited by jet fuel—glowed so intensely that Mr. Videau, an Army helicopter pilot, could navigate by their light.
Mr. Videau was one of tens of thousands of people exposed to fire pits while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many have since filed for damages with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Congress has also taken up their case.
Mr. Videau thought he had left the burning trash behind, like so many parts of his commitment, when he returned to Kansas in 2007. But in 2008, his morning runs started to suffer. A doctor who examined his X-rays told him his lungs were “like a 70-year-old’s,” even though he was in his early 30s.
“I started thinking about plastic,” said Mr. Videau, and soon he and his wife started removing it from their home as much as possible. “That changed my outlook on life.”
But he still couldn’t get around plastic detergent containers. In 2017, he began researching whether laundry sheets could replace standard soap. After some complex negotiations with a company that patented such plates, Mr. Videau and a partner started their business. Soon they were selling 25,000 boxes of soap sheets.
Since the first year, Mr. Video, Sheets Laundry Club has sold a total of more than $9 million and prevented more than 615,000 plastic containers from being sold.
“It was not intended to raise awareness about burns,” he said. “It was to create a sustainable business for my family. We believe that if we do the right thing, the money will come.”
The journey of mr. Videau is done, now that he wants to donate his products to overseas troops.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “I know what it’s like not to get things in the mail.”
Matthew Griffin was a 4th-generation soldier and a West Point graduate who plunged into the war immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. “I grew up on ‘Rambo’ and thought the best way to serve my country was to be an Army Ranger,” he said.
After leaving as captain in 2006, Mr. Griffin found his way into the contract world and in 2008 he was back in Afghanistan setting up medical clinics.
One day, he visited a combat boots factory in Kabul, where he was impressed to see workers making a boot that looked like a flip flop. It seemed that many Afghan fighters, accustomed to shoes without laces, “lost tens of thousands of man-hours a day,” struggling with the elaborate laces on their combat boots.
The factory owner had invented military sandals “that met their cultural norms,” said Mr. Griffin. When the owner told him he had no plans for the factory after the war, Mr. Griffin wanted to make the company viable and sustainable, which would benefit the land he once fought in.
He called another Ranger friend, Donald Lee, and the two thought about getting Afghan footwear into the US market. They started making flip flops in the country in 2012 and “failed right away,” he said. They eventually moved production to Colombia, took advantage of bilateral trade agreements with the United States, and began selling Combat Flip Flops online in 2013.
“When we first started out, 80 percent of our customers were military personnel and military families,” said Mr. Griffin.
Their customer base grew and diversified as they added scarves, bags and jewelry made in Afghanistan, Laos and the United States. After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan last year, Combat Flip Flops established its Afghan textile factory to make blankets and cold-weather clothing for displaced Afghans suffering through a brutal winter. A portion of the proceeds from the sale will fund education for girls in Afghanistan, the removal of landmines in Laos and services to disabled veterans in Washington state. “It was a pretty wild ride,” Mr. Griffin said.
