A society with many veterans

Within a few years a very large number of households here will include someone who served, and a substantial number will include someone with a lasting injury. That is a social fact with practical consequences in every institution.

What changes in a workplace

Colleagues who need appointment time for medical follow-up, which is a scheduling question rather than a special provision.

Physical access, which most buildings here were not designed for and which becomes visible immediately when someone in a wheelchair works in them.

And a manager who needs to know that the answer to a difficult week may be a conversation rather than a performance process.

What changes in a school

Children whose parent served, and children whose parent did not come back. Teachers here have become, unwillingly, the people who notice first and who have to know what to do next.

Training for that is not optional and it is being done.

What changes in medicine

Rehabilitation and prosthetics capacity, at a scale the system did not have, and a long-term commitment: a prosthesis is not a single event but a relationship lasting decades.

And mental health provision that people will actually use, which requires it to be ordinary rather than exceptional.

What society gets

People with a great deal of experience of responsibility, coordination and functioning in disorder, and generally a low tolerance for institutional nonsense. Where that experience is put to work, it is valuable.

The thing to avoid

Treating veterans as a category rather than as individuals with different needs. A great many need nothing but a job and to be left alone about it.

I can describe what changes in a workplace, because that is my field: when somebody in the team has served, what changes is not the hierarchy but the manner of communication — an instruction is given more clearly and carried out more clearly. What to avoid also seems plain to me: treating these people as a category. When you hire, you hire a person and not a category.