Eric Lahammer

From Left: CAO Dan Beard,
Wounded Warrior Fellow William Collins,
Wounded Warrior Fellow Eric Lahammer
and Wounded Warrior Program Director Patricia Orsini.

Eric Lahammer’s passion is people. He loves to study them, understand them and to help them.

He followed his passion, and generations of military men in his family, when he enlisted in the Army in 1999.

“I’ve always been fascinated by people and how they work, so I decided to go into human intelligence,” he said.

Lahammer, now 29, began his training as a human intelligence collector in California, where he became an Arabic linguist.

He was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina when he was deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Lahammer worked there for about a year before returning to the U.S. as the end of his enlistment approached. Lahammer was placed under a stop-loss status and was deployed to Kuwait. After a month in Kuwait, he crossed into Iraq at the beginning of the war.

After receiving an honorable discharge, Lahammer began pursing a psychology degree at the University of South Dakota. During his studies, his life with the Army often came up, “Sometimes I could lend some real world experience to some of the things we were discussing,” he said.

Lahammer discovered the House’s Wounded Warrior Program through his local Veteran’s Affairs office.

“This opportunity was perfect for me; it was exactly what I was looking for,” said Lahammer, who took the semester off from college to be a part of the program.

The combination of studying psychology and being a veteran himself uniquely prepared him to work as Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin’s veteran’s affairs coordinator, he said.

“I’ve studied quite extensively depression and post traumatic stress disorder, which are some of the serious issues that veterans are facing today,” he said. “I have found that my background makes it easier for constituents to relate to me and open up to me.”