Coffee, Tea and Wounded Vets

Janis Roznowski first discovered her life’s mission in 1969, after three of her friends died in the Vietnam War. That’s when she started visiting wounded Vietnam vets at the old Brook Army Medical Center.

Today, helping wounded vets has become her lifelong calling through Operation Comfort (OC), a non-profit organization she founded in 2004.

Between 1970 and 2007, Roznowski spent thirty-seven years working as a flight attendant for American Airlines. Back then, when flight attendants were called “stewardesses” she was “Coffee, tea or milk?” personified. Although she retired in 2007, she still looks the part—beautifully groomed and nicely dressed, with a dazzling smile and great eye contact.

She quit flying when she realized she was spending nearly all of her waking hours on the fledgling Operation Comfort. Each month she traded away her work schedule to other flight attendants, so she could stay home to help the vets.

Her husband Tom complained that Operation Comfort was her lover, until he too got hooked on helping vets. Now they spend hours together working to make life better for many who sacrificed much for our country.

Fundraising is not Rosnowski’s strong suit. “I’m not very good at that,” she says. Yet she has grown Operation Comfort from a project she funded out of her own pocket for four years to an organization with an $850,000 annual budget in 2009. And no doubt it will top a million dollars a year in the near future. (Read more at: www.operationcomfort.org.)

She credits her advisory board, which includes some of San Antonio’s best-known movers and shakers, with Operation Comfort’s successes. But board members are quick to credit Rosnowski’s energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to wounded vets for their success. The money they raise helps wounded vets in dozens of ways. Decorating and furnishing waiting areas at BAMC, providing specially designed bikes and other athletic equipment and gear so amputees can participate in a variety of sports, underwriting airfare to take vets to places as far away as Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, and much more.

Like the vets she helps, Roznowski doesn’t know the meaning of the word “no,” or the phrase “we can’t do that.” All is possible in her world—and theirs. Just recently two of her “sled hockey guys” were named to the National USA Sled Hockey Team.

Born in Clovis, New Mexico, shortly after WWII, Roznowski grew up in San Angelo along with three sisters and three brothers. She credits her preacher with teaching her to give back to others.

“He used to visit nursing homes and what we called shut-ins back then and I went along on some of those visits. I got a lot of happiness out of that, knowing just visiting made a difference to others.”

Too young to have flown soldiers to and from Vietnam during that conflict, she was quick to volunteer to fly U.S. forces in and out of Kuwait from 2003 to 2005. She took photos of the men and women on her flights and sent them to their families with personal letters.

“It was just the right thing to do,” she explains.

In 2003, Roznowski began visiting wounded troops at the regional medical center in Landstuhl, Germany, and at BAMC here in San Antonio. She quickly recognized the importance of providing a sense of normalcy to men and women trying to overcome enormous physical and mental difficulties as a result of their wounds. Operation Comfort grew out of that understanding.

She says she will do what she’s doing “for as long as we’re needed, as long as we can raise money for the programs.” Operation Comfort is her life. Her joy is the peace and happiness she brings to wounded vets, their families, and loved ones.

“They are not my kids,” she is quick to say. “They are my brothers and sisters. I believe that our military men and women are truly our national treasure. Now that they are wounded, we must do what we can for them.”

If that sounds a bit sappy, so be it. Janis Roznowski lives each day for this recovery mission. Her life today is truly “coffee, tea, and wounded vets.”