Today, on Veterans Day, Americans honor the men and women who have fought for this country. What's often overlooked is the difficulty returning veterans, especially veterans of color, have finding employment once they leave the service.

"Most Americans think the military veterans have it made when they come out," said Wesley Poriotis, chairman of the Center for Military and Private Sector Initiatives, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in New York City. "That is probably one of the most prevalent myths that we have to deal with. The military experience is no longer considered a valuable business asset."

"The underemployment for military of color seeking quality employment may be 40 to 60 percent," he said. If you have colonels painting houses and nuclear-submarine engineers working as messengers, something is amiss, he said.

When Poriotis' organization approached executive-search firms to place military veterans in corporate America, he said veterans' resumes were virtually ignored. Veterans face stereotypes and myths when entering corporate America, he said, such as they only can issue orders, can't build consensus or are too hierarchical.

Veterans of color "don't have a network -- they have it in the defense community, but not in the non-defense community," said Poriotis.

Most senior executives don't realize that veterans are a corporate asset, not only for their leadership ability, but for their individual skills, said Mike Paul, a spokesperson for Veterans Across America, a program of The Center for Military and Private Sector Initiatives, which advocates for veterans transitioning into the corporate sector. "We spend all this money for the military to go abroad and the investment when they come back is very minimal," he said.

"There are thousands of experts in the military that are absolute experts in logistics, but because we don't understand their jobs, they are not even considered," said Paul. Understanding and implementing logistics in the military is a clear skill, said Paul, "if they're not there in time, people die."

People who lead groups of people develop excellent leadership, goal-setting and strategizing abilities, said Paul, adding that "many of those skills sets are absolutely transferable into corporate America."

Companies limit themselves by only looking at skills prospective employees have acquired in other corporate jobs, said Paul.

This return to civilian life can be a "double whammy for people of color," said Paul. Just being a person of color creates problems getting jobs in corporate America, said Paul, complicated by most human-resources departments failing to understand military jobs in terms of skills, said Paul.

Unemployment figures for the youngest group of veterans, ages 20-24, returning to the civilian work-force are higher than the national unemployment rate of 6 percent reported in October.

According to 2002 Department of Labor data for this age group, white male veterans have an unemployment rate of 9.6 percent; women veterans have an unemployment rate of 13.3 percent; African-American male veterans have an unemployment rate of 17 percent; and African-American female veterans have an unemployment rate of 24 percent.

And these figures don't even include veterans who have dropped out of the work-force or have a disability and are unable to work.

Currently, 2.6 million of the 26.4 million veterans in the United States are African American, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. An additional 1.1 million are Latino, 284,000 are Asian American and 196,000 are Native American or an Alaska Native.

"It's a sector that has become alien to most people in corporate America," said Poriotis. With a draft no longer in place, most people no longer have family members or friends who ever served in the military, he said.

The number of African Americans and Latinos in the military is increasing, said Paul. There are more people of color in the military -- from ground level all the way to leadership positions -- than in any other time, he said.

"The way to change this is to get in the mind of an average American," said Paul.

"A Latino soldier that is 19 to 20 years old, that might be married already and have a child on the way -- that is the view of the military veteran we should have, rather than that of the World War II veteran," said Paul.

"They don't need hand claps, they need jobs," he said.