By: Ernest Gurulé
You don’t leave the war behind, you just do because you are no longer there. Pueblo resident Stephen Varela, a U.S. Army combat veteran, knows this as well as anyone. But the war, he said, need not define your future nor cripple your dreams. And for him, it hasn’t.
The 36-year-old California native was barely 20 years old when in 2005 he walked into a recruiter’s office and basically asked for a job, one where there would be plenty of openings and one that not everyone would be seeking. “If you can get me out of here in two weeks, I’ll join,” was his pitch. Fourteen days later, the Salinas kid found himself in Army camouflage and basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. A couple of months later, with basic training behind, it wasn’t long before he was in Fort Riley, Kansas, and with a pretty good idea of what the Army had in mind for him. The Army, after all, also had plenty of job openings in places even more exotic than Kansas.
But before that, there was a quick stop at Fort Benning, Georgia, and jump school. It’s also where he would meet the woman who would later become his wife. “I met her in airborne school,” he said. The woman he would later marry, Kayla, was an Army Reservist, a combat medic and already wearing the parachute medallion of aqualified paratrooper. But unlike him, she had already gone and returned from a first deployment.
Varela’s time in the Army includes two deployments. He was out of country in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. At various times, his job was to ride on the back of an Army truck manning one of the Army’s heaviest and deadliest mobile weapons. Three times he and his team encountered roadside bombs. The blasts concussed him each time. But, he said, in the Army “If you weren’t bleeding, you were CM,” military jargon for ‘continuing the mission.’ The military later deemed his brain injuries permanent and awarded him a full disability pension.
With the Army behind him, Varela, now married, returned not to the Monterrey Bay and Salinas where he grew up, but to Pueblo, where his wife grew up. They started a family and he started school at Colorado State University-Pueblo. While he was there, Varela quickly saw the programs for veterans at the school fell short of providing the needs they required. “There was a lack of representations for veterans,” he said. Working with a fellow veteran, “We wanted to continue peer-to-peer programs” that would help veterans navigate their way more conveniently through their programs. It would be the first step in lending a hand “to our battle buddies.” Returning veterans, especially those with various levels of PTSD, aren’t traditional students and often require non-traditional help.
“Every conflict, every war,” he said, “is unique.” That is why Varela wanted to make things just a little more understandable, a little more stream-lined for the group on non-traditional students like himself and a growing num- ber of others. He wanted to let them be seen and not simply blend into a wall of invisibility as if their experience didn’t happen. He analogizes a veteran’s experience to football. “Everybody loves the quarterback or the running back,” he said. “No one wants to know about the lineman. But the sacrifice is the same and sometimes we forget.” People don’t realize what the contributions (of vets) are,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand what our sacrifices are…teenagers deploying to a foreign country. It’s kind of unnatural,” he said.
Other steps that he took while in school included the creation of a tutoring center. Eventually the pair started a group called “Student Vets of America,” a program that continues at the southern Colorado school. “Doing that was my first experience with helping and getting involved in public service.”
Concurrent with the veteran-assist work, Varela also completed his undergraduate degree, later earning a graduate degree via a virtual program at the University of Southern California.
Varela’s current job is with the Department of Veterans Affairs. He’s also become involved with AFSCME, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He and his wife are also raising four children and there are no plans to return to California’s central coast. Pueblo, he said, is home. But there is still a lot of work to do, and he has his sights on doing more.
Varela has already stepped into the political arena. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Pueblo City Council but now has his sights set on a seat on the Pueblo County Commission.
