Staff Sgt. Roland Paquette remembers everything about Dec. 27, 2005.

It was a cool morning, just a few weeks before he was scheduled to return home from Afghanistan. He was driving along with three other men through the desert in a Humvee and an improvised explosive device went off under the vehicle’s engine block. “Suddenly my ears started to ring and it’s like time slowed,” he says. “Then I saw dust come up underneath the dashboard and felt myself getting propelled upward.”

A member of the United States Army’s Special Forces, also known as Green Berets, Paquette dragged himself from the vehicle and teammates came to his aid, applying tourniquets and starting an IV. He was transferred to a hospital in Kandahar, where both of his legs were amputated above the knee. When he woke up again days later, his wife, Jen, was sitting by his bed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center near Washington D.C.

It’s a day that for many would be remembered as the worst, but Paquette ultimately recalls it as a good day. After all, he says, if he’d been driving just one mile per hour faster, he would have been killed.

The accident not only set him on a new career path—he attended grad school to become a physician’s assistant and is now a professor at UT Health San Antonio—it also changed the trajectory of Jen’s career. She’d spent years in the business world, but after seeing what her husband and other injured Green Berets went through, she wanted more. “For us, it’s always been about servant leadership and having a servant heart,” Jen Paquette says. “So when he got hurt, it was like, ‘Lord, I thought this is what we were supposed to be doing. Now what?’”

She worked first for the U.S. Special Operations Command Care Coalition and then in 2009 teamed up with Aaron Anderson, a Green Beret who’d been at Walter Reed alongside Roland Paquette, and a board of Green Berets to create the Green Beret Foundation.

The San Antonio–based nonprofit steps in to support Green Berets and their families wherever possible, from interviewing nannies and finding pet sitters while soldiers are hospitalized to funding alternative treatments and procedures such as in vitro fertilization. They’ve served over 2,500 Green Berets in the last eight years and now are working to expand their mission by putting a greater focus on helping soldiers transition back into civilian life. “You would think that getting wounded in action would be the worst part—it’s terrible, but we kind of know how to respond,” says Jen Paquette, executive director of the foundation. “It’s the transition that is complicated.”

Training and education is part of helping soldiers find a place in the civilian world, but Jen and Roland Paquette say it’s also about networking and mentoring to ensure their new career is fulfilling just as the battlefield was. “You go from having all of that responsibility to nothing,” Roland Paquette says. “To find that sense of satisfaction and utility again is hard.”

There’s nothing wrong with taking a job that simply pays the bills. However, Jen Paquette says, they want for other Green Berets and their families what they’ve found in their new careers and hometown: a true sense of purpose and belonging.