Jen Solum can do home repairs, assist doctors in a surgical unit and manage a government agency – all skills acquired to some degree from years of military service.

Solum, a U.S. Air Force veteran, is the superintendent at the Veterans Assistance Commission of Will County.

The agency provides services to the veteran population in Will County, which at almost 28,000 is the third-largest among Illinois counties.

Now located in a Joliet office building on Glenwood Avenue, the VAC is slated to move later this year or early next year into the new Veteran Assistance and Support Center being created at a former medical office building at the former Silver Cross Hospital campus in Joliet.

The new location on Copperfield Avenue will provide more space for VAC for expanded services, including a spot where veterans can gather and socialize.

“Veterans as a whole, we tend to gravitate toward other veterans,” Solum said. “We have what they call a tribal mentality.”

The Veteran Assistance and Support Center will provide space for expanded mental health services.

It also will provide space for a spot that Solum said VAC is simply referring to as the “living room.”

“We’re seeing it as a gathering space if veterans want to come,” she said. “It’s a safe place around other people who understand their struggles.”

Solum’s own military experience reflects the agony that a veteran can experience while also gaining experience not likely to be found without enlisting.

Her office is lined with paintings and sketches of World War II bombers and fighter planes, mementoes of a grandfather who served in a World War II bomber in what was then the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Solum enlisted in the Air Force in 1997 without any particular skills. But she tested with proficiencies as an airplane mechanic, and that’s what she did.

“I used to fix airplanes,” she said without enthusiasm.

It wasn’t work she wanted to pursue in civilian life, although she said it has made her handy around the house.

After her service in active duty ended in 2001, Solum signed up in the Air Force Reserve but cross-trained into medical services and became a surgical technician.

Switching to fixing airplanes to mending the wounded posed its own challenges as Solum was assigned to Afghanistan in 2009, a year when combat brought many wounded soldiers to the unit in which she served.

It was “a rough year,” Solum said. “But I met my husband there so it worked out.”

Her future husband, Stephen Solum, was a flight medic who treated wounded soldiers as they were brought into the medical unit where Solum worked.

Their romance under the pressures of battle undoubtedly is a reflection of what Solum describes as the unique experience of military veterans.

After Afghanistan, Solum went to work as a surgical assistant at Good Samaritan Medical Center in Downers Grove.

Still restless for another line of work, Solum enrolled at Northern Illinois University to study social work.

It was during an internship at the Veterans Assistance Commission of will County, that Solum found a niche that led to where she is today.

Within six months of the internship, Solum was hired as a service officer at the commission.

In just another six months, she was hired as assistant superintendent and by 2023 Solum became superintendent of the commission.

Her military experience may not have included management, but it did provide her with skills on how to work under stress along with another lesson that Solum said applies to her job today.

“It teaches you service before self,” she said.

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