Eric Boodman , 2025-04-17 08:30:00
In the months before she lost her job at the Food and Drug Administration, Karen Hollitt’s mom and boyfriend kept telling her not to worry. She’d be fine, they said; she was a veteran.
She knew better. She’d read the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second presidency. She knew there were plans to slash federal workers like her. Her PTSD symptoms crept back. She’d graduated from therapy in 2020, hadn’t needed medication since 2022. Her flashbacks had stopped bothering her; she could talk matter-of-factly about those horrific memories without spiraling. She could be present in her everyday life. With her livelihood at risk, though, that began to slip.
She’d be at home in Ranson, W.Va., her 9-year-old chattering about Roblox or Minecraft, and she wouldn’t even realize he’d been talking. Then she’d snap out of it, and try to catch up, but it was too late.
“What, buddy?”
“Nevermind.”
She went back to therapy, started on Prozac again, and took hydroxyzine to help her sleep, though she still woke at 4:30, distracting herself with solitaire or Wordle or Reddit. When she did finally get an email in the wee hours on April Fools’ Day, saying she’d been RIF’d — federal worker slang for laid off, an acronym for “reduction in force” — her anger was mixed with a strange relief: At least the dread was gone, replaced with real, immediate worries about finding a job when there weren’t many to find.
With firings like Hollitt’s, the government was bulldozing a well-mapped path toward the American dream. She’d come of age in a town of 500 in Wisconsin, where the military felt like one of the only options besides the farm or the factory. It was a way out, an apparatus for turning blue collars white — and the white-collar jobs waiting on the other side were often federal. The U.S. government is the single largest employer of veterans. They are given preference in hiring, and make up some 30% of its workforce. Slashing federal jobs doesn’t just mean axing people who’ve sworn to defend the Constitution — which is generally true of public servants — but also some who’ve put their lives on the line.
To Hollitt, that was a betrayal. “I don’t ever want to feel like something’s owed to me,” she said. “It’s just the way politicians use veterans as pawns. You know, they say they care about us and our health care, and then they cut us from the workforce. Or they cut the people that work for the VA. How are they supposed to care for us if there’s no people there to care for us? It just feels like a big lie.”
She wasn’t above flipping burgers at Five Guys. With a full-time schedule, she and her four kids could probably get by. There was the question of health insurance, though. And would a fast-food joint even hire her? She was 43, and way overqualified. She’d spent years analyzing radar data so military aircraft could avoid being shot down by enemy missiles. She’d trained personnel for the Army, the Navy, the Coast Guard, and the Marines. She had a master’s in history and a doctorate in education. Since 2023, at the FDA, she’d instructed assessors on reviewing drug-approval applications so that they were following all ethical and regulatory rules.
Now, after 20 years in military or public service, she’d take what she could get. She was angry at politicians, but also at herself. She kept wondering why she’d thought this path could work out. Some small part of her might’ve held the same credulity she heard from her boyfriend and her mom: “I just really believed that if anybody would be safe, the veterans would be safe.”
In the winter, when they shut off the water in the barn to prevent burst pipes, Hollitt woke at 4:30 to fill the drinking tank. She lugged two 5-gallon pails out over the frozen gravel drive, setting them down so she could clamber up onto the gate that kept the cattle in, reaching down for one and then the other. She was a tiny thing, but had the wiry strength you get growing up on a farm. Technically, what she and her aunt and uncle lived on was a “farmette,” just 28 acres, nowhere near as big as the dairy operation her grandparents had had before her grandfather’s stroke.
These were beef cattle, raised for slaughter. She named them anyway. Beautiful had one eye askance, a funny steel-wool-like tuft on his head, and a temper that nearly got her trampled. Toothless had jutting buck teeth. Bluey’s pupils had a milky sheen to them, especially in sunlight. In the mornings, she could see the clouds of their breath.
Poverty wasn’t far away. The person she called her grandfather — officially, the father of her aunt by marriage — spent six months in the state penitentiary for nabbing turtles out of season. He was a Navy vet with alcoholism who’d wake up, have a cup of coffee, and then drink Busch Light all day. In the cookbook his wife sold for $8 apiece, she often combined game with shelf-stable convenience foods: ground venison with canned pineapple chunks, wild rabbit with a can of cream of mushroom soup, turtle meat with barbecue sauce or dumplings from a Bisquick box.
Her earliest years were spent in Tomah, Wis. She had no relationship with her dad, and when her mom moved south for rheumatoid arthritis reasons, Hollitt stayed with her aunt and uncle, who soon bought the farmette in Wilton, a speck of a village nearby. “Good luck finding that on the map,” she says. She didn’t want to stay forever. From what she saw around her, she could’ve grown up to work in the cattle industry or the cranberry bog, manufactured glass at Cardinal, bolts at Brunner, or lawnmowers at Toro. She could’ve become a nurse or a truck driver. She saw those as honorable professions — she had been raised with a respect for hard work, had waited tables as a teenager, had helped care for her uncle’s animals — but they weren’t what she dreamed about. She wanted to be a writer or a teacher or a zoologist. She filled journals with her teenaged self-doubt, her uncertainty about where she belonged.
“I don’t know who I want to be anymore — psychology interests me but writing means everything — one top selling novel and I’d be set — I don’t know what I’m holding back from — I’m afraid when I go to college I’ll lose Andy — when I think of love there are so many kinds of it that I feel,” she wrote in 1998.
She remembers lying in the bath — the same tub where she filled those early-morning 5-gallon buckets — resolving that the military was her ticket out. She enlisted at 17, in 1999, and left for basic training a few weeks after her 18th birthday.
There was violence long before Hollitt got anywhere near a war zone. In 2000, while she was still in training, another trainee raped her in her dorm room. The trauma was only compounded by the aftermath. The psychologist or psychiatrist she was sent to made things worse, not better. “He essentially made me feel like I had made the whole thing up, or that I was exaggerating, and did literally nothing for me, other than referring me to the clinic to get tested for STDs,” she said.
She wrapped the memory in shame and buried it. Within a few years, she was stationed in San Antonio and married to a guy she’d met there on the base. She was an intelligence analyst. He was a transportation specialist. They’d had different upbringings, but he made her laugh. Soon, they had a kid. They hired a babysitter so that they could go to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for her 21st birthday.
She was working in electronic signals intelligence, identifying specific weapons in foreign countries from data tables and aerial images. She learned to read potential threats in shadows: the hints lying in antennas, what missiles looked like raised on truck beds or straight on the ground. She felt stuck in Texas. She was transferred to Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. She had another child. She got divorced and met someone else. After seven years of active duty in the Air Force, she left and moved to North Carolina. She got remarried. It was around the time of the financial crisis, and the job market was tough.
“I wasn’t even getting hired at Walmart or Home Depot,” she said. “At the time, contracts to Iraq or Afghanistan were the big-money items, and they were always looking for people, because not a lot of people wanted to go.”
She went. She spent a year in Iraq, wishing she were back home with her kids. She flew home for her eldest’s first week of kindergarten, then flew out again to go back to her job in intelligence.
“As you can imagine, a lot of Iraqi civilians, for good or bad, were getting arrested by our coalition forces in Iraq because they were suspected of planting a bomb or planning an attack or anything like that,” she said. “I would … look at the evidence that was collected with that person and say, ‘No, you need to let this person go,’ or, ‘Yes, keep this person in custody.’”
She still wanted to write, and she’d try sometimes, but she’d be two pages in and get stuck and think, This is stupid, why would I write about this? She sometimes dreamed of visiting nursing homes as an anthropologist and collecting the stories of the generation living there before it disappeared.
Eventually, back in the United States, she found herself working 12-hour shifts from 9 to 9 — a few weeks on days, a few weeks on nights — remotely monitoring terrorism suspects. The work could be hard to stomach. Many of her colleagues coped by drinking. On breaks, someone might boast about crushing six-packs and passing out last night. Sometimes, on her hourlong drive home from Virginia to West Virginia, she’d chain-smoke and cry.
She knew the importance of intelligence, but she wasn’t sure she agreed with everything her work led to. She wanted to be helping people more directly. Before she left, she developed training that would lower the turnover rate, to give people a chance to get accustomed to the intensity of the workplace. “The hiring is very secretive,” she said. “In this particular job, you don’t really know where you’re working until the day you show up.”
The issue with PTSD is that stress can bring about what almost felt like a relapse. Hollitt only got officially diagnosed in 2019, when her then-husband — her second, whom she’d met while on duty in Hawaii — was on a yearlong contract overseas. “He was gone, and I was in school for my doctorate. I had four children at home, and I was losing my mind,” she said. “I was starting to drink. And I knew that I couldn’t be this person.”
Up until that point, she hadn’t gotten any care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but she needed care now. She walked into a VA hospital outside of Philadelphia and told the person at the front desk she was in a bad place and needed help. She was suicidal. The rational part of her knew she shouldn’t act on that, she needed to be there for her kids, and she wanted to forestall anything before that rational side of her was overridden.
She saw a provider immediately. On the intake form, one of the questions was: What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? She wrote about being raped at 18. She spiraled. The provider told her she had “military sexual trauma”. “They actually have a term for it,” Hollitt said. “That’s how common, unfortunately, it is.”
A PTSD diagnosis got her into various kinds of therapy. She recounted her story again and again with different sensory stimuli — noises buzzing, lights flashing — diverting attention from the inner turmoil, detaching the recollection from the terrible reaction that could come with it. She sat in groups with other women who’d been assaulted. She journaled. By 2020, the circuitry of her brain felt rewired enough that she could talk about the memory without descending back into it. She no longer needed therapy. Within a few years, she could stop her medication.
The job at the FDA had been a promotion. After the counterterrorism role, she’d spent a few years working outside of the government and the military: a stint in human resources, a tour of duty as a high school teacher, the doctorate. But then she’d gone back as a civilian, applying her teaching skills for different branches of the military, and eventually, for the Office of Pharmaceutical Quality.
When the RIFs came, she kicked herself. If only she hadn’t taken this promotion. If only she’d stayed with the Coast Guard, she might still have a job. Sitting at the island in her kitchen, she pulled up the spreadsheet she’d made for herself, to calculate how little she and her kids could get by on if need be. In Ranson, her rent was $2,100 a month. Her car payments were $570, credit card $300, cell phone for herself and her kids $220, insurance $200, electric bill $90, sewer and water bill $70. She’d signed a lease in February. The day after she learned she was getting fired, she emailed her landlady to ask if they might be able to work something out if she had to break her lease. She could move in with her boyfriend in Virginia Beach — consolidate households, save some money — but she didn’t want to take her two youngest kids out of school, nor did she want to live a four-and-a-half-hour drive away.
She’d written to Riley Moore, a Republican congressman from West Virginia, and he’d responded, “President Trump is delivering on his promise to fix government, crush the weaponization that captured agencies, and root out waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency.” She’d followed up with a job recruiter who’d reached out to her, only to get a generic rejection: “Your interest is genuinely appreciated. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that you have not been selected for this position.”
That was one of nearly 50 jobs she’d applied to since the election in November. So far, she’d gotten three interviews — though the most promising position wouldn’t pay enough to keep her and her kids afloat. Things weren’t dire yet; she was on paid administrative leave until June, but she needed a plan. Otherwise, she said, “I’m going into an unknown world there where I don’t know how to navigate, like not being able to pay my bills.”
One of her exes had been helpful, agreeing to get her two youngest on his health insurance. But the father of her two older kids was incommunicado. She’d texted him a few times and gotten no response. She’d asked her daughter to ask him, and still nothing. The thought of it sometimes made her break down.
Recently, she’d created a newer, less impressive version of her CV, without her doctorate and with toned-down descriptions of her jobs, making them sound more clerical than they were, tailoring her story to fit less shiny opportunities. She just needed something. She wasn’t afraid of physical work or administrative work. She was resourceful, her boyfriend and mom told her, she’d be fine — and she repeated it to herself as she clicked through job posting after job posting. She’d be fine.