Business boot camps are teaching disabled veterans the skills to start small companies.

In Place of Fatigues, Business Suits

MAJ. STEPHEN THOMAS began to consider starting a business in the year after he was badly wounded in Iraq and was being treated at a succession of Army hospitals. “I was bored with nothing to do,” he says.

Four years after being treated for the leg and jaw fractures and burns he suffered in a roadside attack, he was talking to an audience at the University of California, Los Angeles, about his proposal to build an events center for business meetings and social occasions in Huntsville, Ala., where he is stationed as a manager of equipment procurement for the Army’s Future Combat Systems project. He plans to build the Venue, as he calls his proposed center, in the next three years and run it full time when he retires in 2011 after 20 years on active duty.

By JAMES FLANIGAN

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/business/smallbusiness/21edge.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin