For many of America’s bravest men and women, the joy of coming home from a deployment is sometimes shattered by the harsh reality of injuries, night terrors and post traumatic stress disorder.

Repeat deployments and more than a decade of war have strained America’s military forces. As the war in Afghanistan winds down, many injured soldiers are returning and must find careers in the civilian workforce. Every year for the next five years, about 16,000 soldiers will return to civilian life and will be looking for jobs.

In addition to preparing soldiers for the transition, the U.S. Army’s Warrior Transition Command recently announced a new program that aims at potential employers, to educate them about wounded veterans and dispel stereotypes about hiring the men and women who have been fighting overseas .

According to a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey, 36 percent of employers feel PTSD and other mental health issues such as Traumatic Brain Injury make it risky to hire veterans.

“PTSD and TBI are treatable conditions which are not unique to the military,” said Brig. Gen. David Bishop, commander of the Warrior Training Command. “Most individuals affected go on to have successful, productive lives.”

In the United States, the most common cause of PTSD is not related to the military; motor vehicle accidents actually account for most of the cases of PTSD.

As the world’s largest human resources organization, SHRM is working with the Warrior Transition Command to help employers understand that not every veteran suffers from PTSD.

“This is an urgent issue. We don’t want a lost generation of veterans,” said Jeff Pon, chief human resources and strategy officer at SHRM.

Staff Sgt. Paul Roberts’ injuries from an improvised bomb in Afghanistan ended his Army career. But the Army offered him resources to turn his military resume into a competitive civilian one.

“I didn’t need a job. I wanted one. People need a sense of purpose or they start to shut down and wither away,” Roberts said.

Veterans are great job candidates because they have leadership experience, negotiating skills and a commitment to the mission, Bishop said. But oftentimes employers don’t understand military jargon to see how these skills transfer into the civilian workforce.

Ret. Staff. Sgt. Jeremy Boutwell’s injuries led to an early retirement from the Marines in 2011.

“I never thought about doing anything but being a Marine. Having to think about that is difficult. Like, what do you do now?” Boutwell said.

Active-duty Marines who are making the transition to civilian life go through a course that includes resume building and mock interviews. Still, it’s the Marine Corps’ emphasis on leadership and mission accomplishment that makes them marketable.

“If you have a guy who knows how to influence people in a positive way and is motivated, he can do anything and he will be successful,” Boutwell said. The key is learning how to convey intangible skills such as leadership to an employer.

“Quantify it. Tell them who you’ve led, where you’ve led them and what you led them to do,” Boutwell said.

Boutwell said some of his friends who’ve had trouble finding a job after the Marines needed to “humble themselves.”

“If you’re trying to find a job to put food on the table, you’ve got to tell yourself you are now entering the workforce with people that have been working a lot longer than you,” he said. “You may not start the job that you want, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”

For war reporters covering the military, the threats these journalists face are often the same as the ones facing the troops they cover. To cover these types of beats safely, journalists need more than a strong portfolio– they need hostile-environment and security training.

Most training courses are taught by current or retired military personnel. Journalists learn how to protect themselves in hazardous areas by learning in a classroom as well as in the field.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is an organization that aims to protect journalists around the world, and in protecting them, promotes freedom of the press.

While hostile-environment and emergency-first-aid courses aren’t cheap– five-day courses can cost $3,000 or more– they become invaluable when the skills a journalist learns there save his life.

According to the CPJ’s annual “Journalist Security Guide,” the first step reporters must take, no matter if they are in a war zone or covering riots like those during the Arab Spring, should be to get the right gear.

In the same way that a good reporter always his notebook, a working pen and a camera, foreign correspondents should always have what they need to protect themselves as best as they can.

Eric Eckstrom, a Medill graduate student, received first-hand training from Centurion, a risk assessment training program for journalists.

“There’s only so much classroom exposure can offer. It was something there was no way you could substitute it with talking about it. You have to go through it to understand what it is,” Eckstrom said.

The committee recommends all reporters covering war zones wear full-suit body armor, including a vest that could stop high-velocity bullets shot from military rifles. But all body armor is not created equal, and even the best products can’t give their owners 100 percent peace of mind that they can’t be injured or killed.

Reporters need to take very good care of their armor overseas and pay attention to how its cared for. Human sweat, for example, can deteriorate Kevlar, a material commonly found in body armor.

After gearing up, the next important decision for a foreign correspondent to make is where they will be reporting from. Journalists have two options when covering wars: they can “embed” with a military unit and report straight from the front lines, or they can do their reporting independent of military forces.

While embedding with a unit has typically been safer than reporters who are working on their own without the extra protection, CPJ statistics show 15 journalists who were embedded with military units died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Security training courses should also verse journalists with the rules of war.”No civilian, even a journalist, may be legally targeted by any forces,” the CPJ’s security guide reads. But in spite of it, 947 journalists have been killed since 1992.

Not all of them were killed in combat zones, to be sure, but journalists embedded with units can be fired upon or taken as prisoners of war.

For some journalists fresh out of school, the appeal of reporting overseas can outweigh the risks involved. Frank Smyth, senior adviser for journalist security at CPJ said young reporters should take advantage of opportunities to report overseas, so long as they are very aware of their motivations.

Some journalists may put themselves in risky situations for the sake of the glory that will come with it.

“Every high-risk decision brings the potential of lasting, positive impact, and the possibility of permanent, tragic loss,” Smyth wrote in his blog titled “Should J-School grads just get up and go overseas?” “Experience can better help you discern between duty, ego, and adrenaline.”

Female journalists often face the additional risk of sexual assault. CBS correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and assaulted in Cairo after she was separated from her crew in 2011.

Judith Matloff, a Columbia University journalism professor and former foreign  correspondent said there are some steps women can take to try and avoid situations where they could become victims of sexual assault,  and knowing the local language and customs is key.

“A colleague told me that if you went out with your hair wet in Iraq it had a sexual connotation,” Matloff said.

But knowing how each candidate will handle the country’s foreign affairs— issues that have not taken a vacation during the U.S. campaign — should be as important to voters as the economy and the role of government. Some argue that foreign policy needs to trump other issues, because our national safety and welfare is at stake.

Dominating the foreign policy debate at the end of last month and frequently news headlines is Iran. Both Obama and Romney say they would ensure that Iran will not become a nuclear player, and will stand by Israel in the event that Iran attacks.

While much of the attention has focused on Iran operating from its physical position in the Middle East, Iran may pose a greater threat to the United States by supporting terror movements in Latin America.

Marine Maj. Landon Hutchens said the terrorist organization Hezbollah, which operates as an arm of Iran, has been gaining a foothold in Latin America. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in July said that people affiliated with terrorist groups probably have entered the United States from Latin America, probably by crossing the border with Mexico. The United States may have bigger fish to fry than Obamacare.

The ties between Iran and Venezuela, led by anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez, are very real, Hutchens said. Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had visited the South American region six times in six years.

“We take Iranian activity in the hemisphere very seriously and we monitor its activities closely,” Fraser said.

Ambassador Roger Noriega, a Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, testified before the Committee on Homeland Security back in 2011 saying Hezbollah was providing weapons and training for drug traffickers operating on the U.S. border with Mexico.

Iran is no longer half a world away, but at our doorstep.

“I believe the Hezbollah/Iranian presence in Latin America constitutes a clear threat to the security of the U.S. homeland,” Noriega testified. “They have the motivation, and they have steadily increasing their ability to act.”

So whoever is elected president Tuesday will face more than a grumbling constituency of voters expecting big changes at home, but also emerging security threats very close by.