WHAT’S NEXT Transition to Civilian Life By Eve Nasby eve@infused.work
From Naval Officer to Nation Builder
Derek Barksdale spent over two decades protecting others. Now he's built a system to make sure no veteran is left navigating civilian life alone. There is a moment, familiar to nearly every man and woman who has worn a uniform, when the structure that defined their identity — the rank, the mission, the chain of command — simply disappears. What fills that void determines everything.
client stood on the doorstep of his new home and wept as he received the keys. He was the first person in his entire family to ever own a house.
For Derek Barksdale, retired Naval Officer, senior government service employee, entrepreneur, and founder of Military Mutual, that void became a calling. And that calling became an ecosystem — one designed to ensure that tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations serving veterans are no longer invisible to the people who need them most. His story does not begin with the military. It begins in Oakland, California, at age 17, with a paintbrush and an entrepreneurial instinct that outpaced his years. He built a painting business from nothing, found success in peak season, and discovered the hard truth of what happens when there is no financial structure to carry a young business through the slow months. Too driven to accept a nine-to-five, too restless to plateau — in 1989, he enlisted as an E-1. What he found in the Navy exceeded every expectation. "I had people who believed in me," Barksdale says. Over more than two decades and seven deployments rooted largely in San Diego, he rose from enlisted sailor to Naval Officer, through nine ranks, ultimately serving as Deputy Chief of Police for Navy Region Southwest after retirement. Along the way, he discovered something that would shape every venture that followed: he is, at his core, a lifter of people. The pivot to real estate was, as the best pivots often are, completely accidental. In 2007, his wife obtained her real estate license and landed her first client — a sailor he had referred to her. Barksdale found himself drawn in to help navigate uncharted waters. And then something happened that changed the trajectory of his life: that 32
HomelandMagazine.com / May 2026
Derek at VA Benefits Class