TAMPA — The top enlisted leader of America’s most elite and secretive military forces stood with his wife before a classroom of senior commandos here to speak about war’s destruction. Not on the battlefield — but within the walls of their home.

“We’re going to share some pretty ugly, personal stuff here today,” Command Sgt. Maj. Chris Faris, 50, warns an audience of 30 special ops veterans, nearly all married men.

“This is the way not to make a marriage work,” says Lisa Faris, 47, echoing her husband. “We succeeded in that. But let me tell you, there are ways to fix it if you try.”

For the next two hours at the Joint Special Operations University, the room full of commandos was a rapt audience for Lisa and Chris — for years a member of the Army’s highly secretive Delta Force and recipient of seven Bronze Stars, including one for valor. They outlined the near-collapse of their 22-year relationship.

“My gut tells me that our story probably rang true for most everybody in this room,” Chris Faris says at the conclusion.

“The Chris and Lisa Show,” as he labels it with grim humor, is part of a broad initiative by Adm. William McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, to deal with mounting emotional strain on his 66,000-member force. Indeed, the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed many troops to their limits, with a spillover effect in military families that can test relationships and often end them. Even as the war in Afghanistan winds down, special operations troops — including Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Green Berets and Army Rangers — are expected to continue playing a crucial role, fighting at a high tempo.

In a rare moment for a largely secretive military force of openly acknowledging a decade of war strain, the command allowed a reporter to sit in on the couple’s candid presentation.

For more than a year, Chris Faris has talked to small groups of special operations troops about his marital struggles in an effort to help them deal with theirs. Only recently did he ask Lisa to lend her voice to the cause and invite service members’ spouses to these sessions.

McRaven says that Chris and Lisa Faris “are doing something very personal and powerful for our community — they’re sharing their story with everyone. Our service members and spouses need to know that they are not alone with their challenges and problems.”

Last year, Special Operations Command conducted a broad internal study of stress on its force. Hundreds of focus groups drew 7,000 troops and a thousand spouses at military locations around the world, and the findings were sobering: Many marriages had become lifeless unions in which couples stay together only because military spouses are too busy in combat zones to file for divorce.

Lisa speaks to this inertia at one point when she tells the audience about asking a therapist “how I could get the strength to find out what was wrong with me. And how I could get the strength to walk away from him.”

When the session ended, troops in the room were bursting with questions. Citing their own marital struggles, they were eager to learn how to save a relationship — a growing challenge in the military. Within the Army at large, for instance, divorce has risen by 25 percent since 2005, from 3.2 percent to 4 percent, according to Pentagon data. The national rate in 2009, the most recent year available in federal data, was 3.4 percent.

Chris and Lisa relayed painful lessons: how shutting down human feelings, a skill sharpened during intense combat, becomes a hazard at home; how years away at war robs a couple of the ability to listen, understand and simply like one another.

The deleterious effect of a long war, Chris says, “was insidious and it was slow and it crept into our lives.”

He began fighting for his marriage in 2008 only after an 18-year-old daughter’s simple admonition regarding the last time he was home for her Dec. 27 birthday.

“She goes, ‘Dad, I was 10,’ and she turned around and walked out of the room,” Chris Faris says. “Every day that (has) passed, I realized I’m going to die with regrets.”

WASHINGTON -- Matt Pizzo has a law degree, can-do attitude, proven leadership skills, and expertise in communications and satellite technology from his four years in the Air Force.

Yet the 29-year-old has been told that he's overqualified, too old, too nontraditional, and that he's fallen behind his civilian contemporaries.

"It was disheartening, to say the least," he said of his latest job rejection. "But it's typical, I'm afraid."

For unemployed veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, rejection is a special ordeal. Veterans' advocacy groups and many unemployed veterans say civilian employers don't always appreciate veterans' skills and maturity.

They point out that this is the first generation of employers who have no widespread military experience and thus no inherent appreciation for what the institution can provide.

Further, the increased military and media attention given to post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury has had the effect of stigmatizing veterans, advocates say. Some employers fear that soldiers diagnosed with these conditions are prone to violence or instability.

The unemployment rate for veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq is 10.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For veterans age 24 and under, the rate is 29.1%, or 12 percentage points higher than for civilians the same age. That compares with 8.2% unemployment nationally, and 7.5% for all veterans.

A survey this year by the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found that a quarter of its members could not find a job to match their skill level, and half said they did not believe employers were open to hiring veterans.

"These veterans have skills and maturity a decade beyond their civilian peers," said Tom Tarantino, the group's deputy policy director, who couldn't find work for 10 months after he left the Army in 2007. "It's very frustrating for them to be told they have to retrain for jobs they've already been trained for in the military."

Tarantino said that he spent 10 years as an officer who managed a multimillion-dollar budget and supervised 400 people.

"They just don't get it," Tarantino said of today's employers. "It's hard to make that cultural connection."