The trip begins

I've been on the road five days now, and have gotten to meet with contractors in Las Vegas and Albuquerque so far. The two of them, former prison warden Darrin Hays, 40, and truck mechanic Fred Gaus, 58, have dramatically different stories that, taken together, say a lot about what I'm after on this trip.

More detailed posts on each will follow (once I slow down enough to go back over the interviews and photos), but generally speaking, one is still plagued by a host of injuries four years after a pair of accidents in Iraq. The other, injured just two months ago, is steadily recovering from an IED blast and hopes to return to work in Iraq soon. Needless to say, they have two very different outlooks.

I'll be posting reports from each stop I make, and soon I'll also post work the work from Texas over the last year that led up to this trip.

I'm headed to Houston tomorrow morning, to sit in on a trial to decide how much earning capacity one former contractor has lost due to his injury abroad. It's a process most of the folks I've talked to are still waiting to go through, (another whose trial I was hoping to catch just learned his was pushed back until the new year), without knowing quite what to expect.