In the midst of worrisome unemployment rates, President Obama recently reminded employers that the jobless rate for veterans is higher than that of civilians, and people with jobs to offer should consider offering them to men and women home from war. As incentive beyond patriotism, businesses hiring veterans will receive tax credits, and a task force is being developed to design a kind of reverse boot camp for job training.

Of course veterans need jobs, and they need training and moral support to create a home life distinct from the military. But they also need something else—to come to terms with their war experiences and to face them head on even as they turn their backs. They need not just to shed their uniforms in exchange for street clothes but also to confront those uniforms, literally and symbolically, in order to regain control of their lives.

Combat Paper Project helps them do that very thing. In workshops around the country, veterans walk in with their combat uniforms, the ones that covered them as they maneuvered through and survived ghastly circumstances, and they turn them into handmade paper that becomes cathartic art.

Veterans, particularly those with posttraumatic stress disorder, have described the process of becoming a soldier as one of being turned into a machine that feels very little. But when the war is over, they are left with the task of relearning to feel as a warm-blooded human being should feel. Easier said than done.

Enter army veteran Drew Cameron and artist Drew Matott who initiated Combat Paper Project. Through five-day workshops, they and their team provide participants help with that daunting task. Veterans shred their uniforms strip by strip and beat the pieces into a pulp. They dip a form into the slurry of fiber and water and bring up the makings of a sheet of paper that will be pressed and dried. They learn to take the paper they have made and impress upon it their truest emotions, whether those be fear or hostility or pride, without judgment or ridicule.

Under the guidance of empathetic artists, some add paint or silk-screening to their paper canvases in order to express their personal trauma. Some turn their paper into journals or books of poetry or sculpture; and they all walk away knowing they have transformed something woven with the worst of war into something beautiful, creating a life-affirming object from an object designed for destruction.

If you have ever made paper, you know that the material you begin barely resembled the end result. The otherwise throwaway scraps or fibers form a big mess on the work surface, but the end result is something useful, creative and personal. This process is the same but with much more at stake than craft time.

Can five days of paper making be the ultimate antidote to PSTD? No. Will turning a uniform into art completely reverse the damage combat does to the human psyche? Of course not. But what this project can do is give veterans the tools they need to relearn and to reconstruct life after war. In short, the creative process veterans experience through the Combat Paper Project offers them an element of hope.

And these former soldiers aren’t just watching it happen. They are making it happen with their own hands and by their own will. As they beat swords into ploughshares, they are transforming themselves from machine to full-fledged men and women and determining to control their own lives one sleeve or one battle-worn pant leg at a time.

As Cameron said, “The story of the fiber, the blood, sweat and tears, the months of hardship and brutal violence are held within those old uniforms. Reshaping that association of subordination, of warfare and service, into something collective and beautiful is our inspiration.”

By 2016, the U.S. job market will be infused with more than one million veterans returning from deployment, and yes, they will need jobs. But they will also need reassurance and careful help in recreating themselves as human beings.

Combat Paper Project operates through donations. To contribute to the project, visit www.combatpaper.org.