Contractor Life
You’ve not doubt heard the stories about people working past retirement age. Jeff Traylor has taken that to a new level. He’s 71 years old, a Vietnam veteran, and he’s working with the Air Force as a contractor in Afghanistan. He’s doing it because he needed the job. “Regardless of what they may say about age discrimination, it still exists,” Traylor tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson. “I can tell it from the way that my applications were received. That’s one issue.
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For the first time since Islamic State fighters advanced to within 25 miles of this Iraqi city last month, T Bar Sports Lounge is hopping. Jimmie Collins takes a sip of white wine and brushes back a loose strand of hair. "Can you kill the music?" she asks the bartender, who turns down the dial on the stereo and passes her a microphone.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to quiz night," Collins says to the 60 customers, mostly Americans, at the bar. "Tonight's the usual stuff. We'll have two spoken rounds and three picture rounds."
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More than 6,000 miles from Colorado, Ebola is raging in several countries in Africa. More than 2,600 people have died and another 5,000 have been infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia -- countries that are ill-equipped to deal with the virus.
"This is ground zero, if you will, the country where most of the deaths have occurred," said Tim Callaghan, who is heading up the Ebola Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) with USAID, the government agency which handles international disasters.
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As an Army Ranger, Capt. Matthew Griffin never really believed military action in Afghanistan was a solution — a necessary heavy boot in the door, sure, but not something that would build lasting peace. After multiple deployments to that war-ravaged country, he saw plenty of death and destruction. But it was when he returned as a civilian contractor that he was blown away at how growth could come out of that mayhem.
“I was amazed at how businesses were thriving in areas that I never thought could be recovered. I came to this realization that if you can give them something worth protecting on their own, they’re going to do that.” He found himself asking: Why aren’t we doing more to promote small businesses in conflict areas?
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