Tonight, just before the taping of "A Night for Vets: An MTV Concert for the BRAVE" (which airs Friday on MTV at 8 p.m. ET), I was out on New York's 44th Street to speak with a number of combat veterans about their experiences overseas, their expectations for the big night and the Bill of Rights for American Veterans (BRAVE), a petition presented by MTV and several veterans' organizations. Most of those I'd spoken with stood outside for hours, braving the increasingly unbearable cold, huddled together as a mass, in an attempt to conserve body heat, waiting for the concert's 7:30 p.m. start.

What struck me about the vets I'd met was the overall sense of family they seem to share. Having all endured similar experiences, war has, for better or worse, bonded these brave men and women, who displayed their dog tags with pride and recounted for me their time in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan — oftentimes, in vivid detail. In fact, one soldier I spoke with was the guy who was ordered into the narrow, dark hole Saddam Hussein was hiding in, beneath a two-room mud shack on a sheep farm ... but I'll have more on that tomorrow afternoon.

Waiting to get inside, I saw Marines greeting each other with that familiar call, "Semper fi, do or die." I saw soldiers reuniting — men and women who'd shared the same battlefields, hugging each other solidly. Veterans shared doughnuts and entire pizza pies with complete strangers — other soldiers they'd just met, but people they share a unique connection with; a familial connection. One soldier, Air Force veteran Jerry McDougal, perhaps summed it up better than any of the soldiers I'd met.

"By being there, we became something of a family," the 27-year-old Alabama son said; he just returned from Baghdad six months ago, and is still adjusting to civilian life. "You bond with the rest of your unit, and you're there to protect each other. When you leave, you're leaving behind family members."

We recently took a trip to Sallisaw, Oklahoma, to talk to a Marine Corps veteran named John Bennett who now works for the Sequoyah County Sheriff's Department down there. John proposed an interesting idea for a veterans' court that he adapted from a court in Upstate New York.

While nobody comes home from war unchanged, most vets are able to deal with the transition back to civilian life just fine. But many have to deal with big-time mental-health problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury (more commonly known as PTSD and TBI). If untreated, these often lead to alcoholism and drug use, which can get a lot of vets into more trouble and land them in the criminal-justice system for anything from possession charges and DUIs to domestic violence and theft.

Once John heard about the court in New York, he thought they should implement this concept in his own state. Because Sequoyah County is so small, he headed next door to Tulsa County, which has one of the highest rates of returning vets in the country. He worked extremely hard to get a judge to volunteer for vets' court, and got the DA as well as the mayor of Tulsa involved as well.
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Right after coming back from Athens for the launch of MTV Greece, I went straight to Washington, D.C. — a few hours' train ride from New York's Penn Station — for my next assignment. I was excited. It was my first time ever to D.C., and, most importantly, it was my first time ever meeting an actual student veteran.

Graham Palter is a 24-year-old freshman at George Washington University and a veteran of the war in Iraq. Seeking adventure, he joined the Marine Corps at 19 — and he got exactly what he asked for, and then some. While his fellow students at GWU were firing machine guns and blowing things up on their PlayStations, Graham was serving three deployments in Iraq.

(Watch Graham's story after the jump!)
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Methuen, Massachusetts, is a city of approximately 44,600 people, located on the border of New Hampshire, about half an hour north of Boston. As we pulled into our hotel on the main commercial strip of town, I wondered how any law passed in this small city could possibly affect young veterans in the country as a whole. One forgets that many country-changing laws begin in towns even smaller than this.

Alexander and Benjamin McCann returned home to Methuen after serving in Iraq, expecting the transition to civilian life to be somewhat smooth, especially in respect to finding jobs. Alex, who drove Humvees in Iraq, and Benjamin, who served as a Combat Lifesaver (providing emergency medical assistance), assumed they had the skills to land a decent job. (Learn about veterans' issues and sign the petition for BRAVE, the Bill of Rights for American Veterans, here.)

"I figured, 'Oh, I'm a former Marine, a veteran. [I'll] just write it on an application, all my credentials, everything I'm qualified to do. ...There's got to be something out there,' " Benjamin recalled. "So far, it's been nothing but dead ends."

(Watch Alexander and Benjamin's story after the jump.)
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