Oregon Public Broadcasting

For soldiers - the transition from war back to civilian life is often difficult. Now to complicate matters, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are coming home to a shaky economy.

In the Southwest corner of Washington State, one former soldier is struggling to support herself and her new baby while she goes to school.

Correspondent Austin Jenkins reports in Part II of our series “The Squeeze: How a declining economy impacts low income people.”

Tanaja Gravina is escaping – for a few hours - from reality. She sits in a beauty salon chair in Longview, Washington getting her hair cut and colored.

Tanaja Gravina: “We’re putting turquoise and purple and orange and brown in my hair.”

She calls it her mermaid hair.

Tanaja Gravina: “I’m so excited. We got like ten foils and I can go smoke.”

You wouldn’t know it by looking, but Gravina is a former U.S. Army soldier who served a year in Iraq. She joined up shortly out of high school. In Iraq she started out pushing papers, then worked on trucks and finally managed the supply chain for her unit. She loved it.

Tanaja Gravina: “I was a United States soldier and it feels good to have such an intense purpose and to be fulfilling the missions and like when you go out on the road like it’s enticing and it’s erotic and it’s life – I mean it makes you feel alive”

Today, at age 23, Gravina is no longer in the Army. Instead she’s a single mom, a full-time community college student and by night a cocktail waitress.

Tanaja Gravina: “It’s hard being a civilian and waking up everyday and not putting on my uniform is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Gravina didn’t plan to leave the Army. But she got pregnant by a fellow soldier while stateside at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

She says she would have gone back to Iraq after giving birth, but didn’t have anyone to care for her daughter. So she quit the Army and moved home to Southwest Washington – to her mother’s house. That was more than a year ago.

Tanaja Gravina: “I’m broke and make no money because this is the [expletive] of our economy and you can’t find jobs and when you find jobs you don’t make a whole lot of money, wages are down and prices on everything are up and it sucks.”

Cowlitz County -- where Gravina lives -- has the highest unemployment rate in Washington State: over eight percent. Not only are jobs scarce, people don’t spend like they used to. Gravina says before she left for the Army, she could make three hundred dollars a night cocktailing at the local casino. Not anymore. Now she’s lucky if customers tip ten percent.

Tanaja Gravina: “Like don’t get me wrong. I voted for Bush both times and I’m uber-Republican but damn we need a Democrat president right now. Like it’s ridiculous, the economy’s just so bad.”

Gravina says she’s applied for full-time jobs – mostly administrative and secretarial work, but so far no luck. She feels that employers don’t value her Army experience. They just see a single mom cocktail waitress.

Tanaja Gravina: “You know what else am I supposed to say, you’re right I’m not with my baby’s father and I don’t have a steady job and I’m going to school and I don’t make in money and I don’t have a place to live.”

Austin Jenkins: “Some people might say you need to move out of here, you need to go somewhere where there’s jobs. You need to take your kid and just get out of this place.”

Tanaja Gravina: “I would if I, I mean I can’t even afford gas to get into Longview let alone to go anywhere else and I got to finish my degree.”

There are an array of programs to help former soldiers like Gravina make the transition back into civilian life: housing stipends, mental health care, disability benefits, job matching services, college tuition.

Helen Reid is a volunteer with the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Longview. She’s taken Gravina and other local vets under her wing. But over coffee at a local restaurant she says too often the returning soldiers don’t ask for help.

Helen Reid: “Even women do it – get a certain amount of macho-ism. They can do it. But then it comes to a point that they do have to stand up and say hey I need help with this. I’m a veteran and I know there’s so much available for me and stand up and ask for it because it is there.”

Gravina knows there’s help available but says programs that look good on paper don’t always work in practicality. For instance she applied for a special housing grant for veterans. But it required that she live out in the county – not in town. That means she’d have to come up with cash for gas to commute to school.

Tanaja Gravina: “It never works out it seems like, it never looks up, when is somebody going to help you out for the [expletive] you’ve done? It just doesn’t ever happen.”

Gravina readily admits she bears some responsibility for her predicament. She knows getting her hair done when she can’t afford basic bills isn’t a good idea. She justifies it by saying she needs to look good for cocktailing.

Nationally, poverty and unemployment rates among veterans are actually lower than for non-veterans. But the fact Gravina is a single mom changes that equation. In Washington and Oregon, single mother households account for nearly sixty percent of poor families.

On this day, after getting her hair done, Gravina returns home to her 11 month old daughter Alex.

Tanaja Gravina: “Alex. I hear you. Hi big girl. Hey baby.”

Gravina says these days taking care of Alex is her top priority. So is getting an education.

She’s going to school on the GI Bill. But jokes it will only pay for a slacker’s associate’s degree – not the master’s she needs in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a psychologist.

Gravina recently got more cocktailing shifts and found an apartment. But she still struggles paycheck to paycheck. Each month she worries if she’ll have enough money for rent, diapers and gas.