They Served. Now, Inspired by What They Saw, They Sell.

Over two decades of war, American soldiers overseas saw the rubble, the demolished fields, and the ripped up homes and saw potential.

One soldier tried tea for the first-time during his deployment, while another wore flip-flops made from combat boots. Female soldiers met Afghan women and imagined their lives as economically empowered. An Army helicopter pilot became ill from being exposed to burning plastics. He changed his mind about the environment.

Many veterans have set themselves up their own businesses, using small business programs to help them build businesses that are inspired by their combat experience and designed to address economic or social issues in the countries they served.

Nick Kesler, a veteran advocate who once ran a nonprofit consulting firm dedicated to supporting these sorts of deployment-inspired businesses, said the veterans behind them “know the true cost of instability and conflict on the families they aim to support.”

“These businesses create a connection for them between their life in uniform overseas and now their civilian lives back home,” he said.

Below are the stories from four of these businesses.

While growing up in Louisiana, Brandon Friedman had only tried tea in iced form and thought it was “the grossest thing ever.”

“My idea of tea was British ladies with big hats,” he recalled.

His first tea experience was in Iraq with Kurdish soldiers wearing AK-47 bandsoleers. It was just one of many eye-opening moments he experienced during his deployments to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

Outside of the taste, tea drinking in Iraq represented “stopping and slowing down,” Mr. Friedman said. “It was a way to remove yourself from everyday life.”

In 2004, he returned to Dallas and began searching for loose tea bags in halal grocery stores. His life was full of marriage, graduate school, a son, and a career in politics. “I left the war and left the tea in the past.”

In 2016, Friedman began to investigate the origins of the teas he loved. (The black Ceylon Tea he had in Iraq was from Sri Lanka and other countries. He began to explore how he could import tea from areas of conflict. As he began to learn about the different types of tea, his tea education began.

Working with a nonprofit and seeking money on Kickstarter, he and an Army buddy — a former Green Beret — began the business in 2017 in a 250-square-foot office space in the back of a small building, importing from Nepal, Colombia, Vietnam and other countries whose teas can be hard to find in American stores. They now have a 2,000-square foot facility with a storefront and 45 teas from nine different countries.

There have been difficulties. Vietnam’s 300- and 400-year old wild tea trees, which are found in the mountains and forests of the northern provinces Ha Giang and Yen Bai, are particularly difficult to manage.

Some suppliers “are much more casual about timelines,” he said, and were hard to press to meet holiday sales schedules. The biggest issues arise, however, when post-conflict nations like Myanmar and Ethiopia “turn back into current-conflict countries.” On top of all that, of course, came the supply-chain challenges brought on by the pandemic.

According to Mr. Friedman selling tea has become an extension his military mission. He still loves the Ceylon tea that he first tried in Iraq. “I remain convinced that the way out of conflict is through people talking to each other, and commerce,” he said. “We call this peace through trade.”

Emily Miller recalled her first deployment in Afghanistan with the Army over a decade ago. This was when the U.S. military realized how culturally offensive it was for male service members to walk through villages and talk to children and women. In 2011, she joined a team tasked with engaging “the other 50 percent of the population that has been pretty much largely ignored.”

She ended her two deployments “pretty disillusioned with the war effort and how we weren’t making the difference.” She believed that business could be a more effective force for good. Soon Ms. Miller was in Harvard Business School. She was on a Skype chat with Kim Jung, a classmate and Keith Alaniz, a third friend. All of the participants were Army veterans who had cycled through Afghanistan.

He told his friends about his second trip to the Maidan Wardak Province and met Hajji Joseph, a saffron farmer eager to tap into America’s market.

The three friends began mulling saffron with each other. They wondered if they could link farmers with restaurants in the United States. They discussed starting a business to improve the economic conditions in rural Afghanistan.

Ms. Jung explained that Rumi Spice was formed after the trio visited Afghanistan in 2014. (They later added Carol Wang, who spoke Dari, into the mix.

“When the saffron came into the room,” Ms. Jung recalled of their visit, “it just filled the room with this amazing fragrance that I thought any chef would just swoon over.” But it came in a cardboard box wrapped in string, presaging years of work to teach U.S. standards of packaging and food safety to local students and farmers, and to centralize processing in the region, which had never been done.

Rumi Spice has trained almost 4,000 women in the fulfillment and processing centers. Some of these women are receiving a salary for their labor.

The team was careful to not align themselves with the Americans and the Afghan government they supported, which proved to be very wise.

Even after the disintegration of the country’s government last year, Rumi Spice — now with 12 products in 1,800 stores across the United States — continues to employ thousands of women and farmers.

Chris Videau couldn’t help but notice all the trash while he was deployed in Iraq. It was everywhere. A black cloud of pollution hung over the sky. Below, the stench of burning plastic was overwhelming.

The military’s burn pits — giant garbage dumps ignited by jet fuel — glowed so intensely that Mr. Videau, an Army helicopter pilot, could navigate by their light.

Mr. Videau was one of the many thousands who were exposed to burning pits while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many have since filed claims for disability compensation with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Their cause has been also supported by Congress.

When he returned from deployment in 2007, Mr. Videau thought that he had left behind the burning waste. However, Videau’s morning runs started to decline by 2008. A doctor who examined his X-rays told him his lungs “were like a 70-year-old’s” even though he was in his early 30s.

“I started thinking about plastic,” Mr. Videau said, and soon he and his wife began to remove it from their home as much as possible. “That changed my outlook on life.”

However, he could not avoid plastic laundry detergent containers. He began to research whether laundry sheets could be used in place of standard soap in 2017. After complex negotiations with a company patenting such sheets, Mr. Videau began his business. They sold 25,000 boxes of soap sheets quickly.

Mr. Videau stated that Sheets Laundry Club has made more than $9 million in sales since its inception and has prevented the sale of over 615 000 plastic containers.

“The intent wasn’t to create awareness for burn pits,” he said. “It was to create a sustainable business for my family. We believe if we do the right thing, the money will come.”

Mr. Videau’s journey has come full circle, as he now makes a point to donate his products to troops overseas.

“I have been over there,” he said. “I know what it’s like to not get things in the mail.”

Matthew Griffin was a fourth-generation military man, West Point graduate, and was thrust into the war right after the Sept. 11 attacks. “I grew up on ‘Rambo’ and thought the best way to serve my country was to be an Army Ranger,” he said.

After serving as a captain in 2006 and then moving into contracting, Griffin was back in Afghanistan in 2008 to help set up medical clinics.

He visited a Kabul combat boot factory, and was amazed to see workers make a boot that looked like a flip-flop sandal. It seemed that many Afghan fighters, used to unlaced shoes, were “losing tens of thousands of man-hours a day,” struggling with the extensive laces on their combat boots.

The factory owner had invented military sandals “that adhered to their cultural norms,” Mr. Griffin said. After the factory owner said he didn’t have plans for it after the war, Mr. Griffin decided to make the business viable and enduring, which would benefit the country where he fought.

He called Donald Lee, another Ranger buddy and they discussed how Afghan footwear could be introduced to the American market. They started making flip-flops in the country in 2012 and “immediately failed,” he said. They eventually moved production to Colombia and were able to benefit from bilateral trade agreements with the United States. In 2013, they began selling Combat Flip Flops online.

“When we first started, our customers were 80 percent military and military families,” Mr. Griffin said.

Their customer base grew as they added scarves bags, bags, and jewelry made in Afghanistan and Laos to their product line. Combat Flip Flops changed the direction of its Afghan textile factory in order to make blankets for Afghans who were suffering from a harsh winter. Some proceeds from sales have gone toward funding girls’ education in Afghanistan, land mine removal in Laos and services for disabled veterans in Washington State. “It’s been a pretty wild ride,” Mr. Griffin said.