While deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, U.S. Army veteran Matthew “Griff” Griffin witnessed unimaginable violence, poverty and a lack of opportunities for education, in particular for women.

Now that he is back home in Issaquah, Griffin has found a way to give back to the countries in which he has served through his company, Combat Flip Flops.

Combat Flip Flops, which sells a variety of products including flip flops, sarongs, shemaghs jewelry, messenger bags and neckties, not only provides jobs for the people in the Middle East and South America who create its products, but also uses portions of its profits to pay for Afghan girls to go to school and to clear away land mines.

To date, Combat Flip Flops has cleared 5,000 square meters of land mines and put 210 Afghan females into school.

On Nov. 1, Griffin shared his story with the nation at the “Storytellers” event, a TED-style series of speeches by veterans, hosted by the Television Academy and the veteran empowerment group Got Your Six.

“Educated children do not fall victim to radicals … if you want to strangle their recruitment base, you have to educate women,” Griffin said at the event.

Coming from a four-generation military family, Griffin planned to go into the Army from a young age. Between 2003 and 2005, he went on four deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. During his third deployment to Afghanistan, he heard his first daughter born over satellite phone.

As a Field Artillery Officer and member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, a special operations unit, it was the job of Griffin and his comrades to track down terrorists by night. Griffin said his first deployment to Afghanistan was the “most offensive.”

“We were sent into the Hindu Kush (a mountain range between Afghanistan and Pakistan) to villages of 8,000 to 10,000-foot elevation, chasing known fighters,” Griffin said. “It was pretty intensive.”

Despite the dangers of looking for deadly enemies in challenging geographic locations, Griffin said he wouldn’t have considered doing anything else.

“It’s what we live for, what we do. We all loved it at the time,” he said. “Every time you pull one of those people off the street, you’re saving lives. What would you do to stop someone blowing up your neighborhood?”

For Griffin, it was as hard watching the toll that war took on his fellow rangers as it was watching the toll it took on the people living in the Middle East. He said that the toughest part of his time in combat was “a toss-up between seeing the loss of your brothers and sisters in arms, or seeing the tragedy of combat and the people who have to live among the upheaval.”

Griffin got out of the military in 2006, but he was by no means done serving others. Upon getting home, he “wanted to start giving back again.” Griffin was able to go back to Afghanistan through Remote Medical International, a Seattle-based company that provides “customers with medical support services for remote environments worldwide,” according to the company’s website.

When Griffin was in Afghanistan assisting the Afghan National Army in 2010, he went on a tour of a combat boot factory that employed 300 Afghans. When the factory owner told Griffin that the plant would be closed down after the fighting ended, taking away the workers’ means of supporting their large families, Griffin said he “got absolutely furious.”

Griffin saw one of the factory workers make a flip flop shoe with a combat boot sole, and came up with the brainchild for a company that could help to keep Afghans employed. He started making flip flops with the soles of combat boots out of his garage in Issaquah, later moving production to Bogoda, Colombia.

According to Griffin, the two factors that most affect people’s quality of life in war-torn countries are employment and education. He is passionate about aiding both of these categories.

“I traded in rifles and bombs for briefcases and laptops … to help entrepreneurs who are affected by conflict,” he said.

Combat Flip Flops provides jobs for 20 people in Colombia, between 20 and 40 in Afghanistan, 20 in Laos, and 20 at home in the U.S.A.

“You sell one cool product, and 1,800 people get to eat and go to school,” Griffin said.

The products themselves have special meaning behind them. Sarongs and shemaghs are made by Afghan women in a female-owned Kabul factory, while lapis bracelets, made with Afghan lapis, are made by both Afghan and American widows. Jewelry is made in Laos from unexploded ordinance dropped on the country in the Vietnam War years, and messenger bags and neckties are made in Washington state by veterans.

Combat Flip Flops grew by 150 percent between 2014 and 2015, and is expected to have $1.5 million in sales in just 2016.

“The more we grow, the more girls we can put in schools,” Griffin said.

The company works with Aid Afghanistan for Education, a group founded by Afghan women’s rights activist Hassina Sherjan. The group has founded 13 schools, attended by 3,000 women.

It was particularly hard for Griffin, the father of two girls, to witness Afghan females treated as inferior to males.

“It’s tough as a father … of two daughters when you see girls marginalized,” Griffin said. “What can you do when you’re not even allowed to talk to them?”

Besides raising awareness for women’s rights and land mine clearance, Griffin works with other veterans.

“I try to be very active in the veteran community; I try to get out there and encourage veterans … to be active in the community.”

Additionally, he works to spread a more positive message about veterans, which is a big reason why he participated in the “Storytellers” event.

“I work with the entertainment industry to make sure they’re not putting a bad image of veterans on T.V.,” he said, explaining that most Americans form ideas about veterans through T.V. and movie depictions of them, rather than through real-life encounters with veterans.

The worst stereotype about veterans, Griffin said, “is that we’re all broken. The assumption is, ‘Oh, you fought in a war, you must have PTSD.”

In actuality, Griffin said, PTSD “happens in a lot of people, not just veterans.”

For information, visit www.combatflipflops.com.

Griffin shared his story with the nation at the “Storytellers” event, hosted by veteran empowerment group Got Your Six and the Television Academy on Nov. 1 in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Danny Moloshok/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images

Combat Flip Flops have the sole of a combat boot; Griffin first came up with the idea for the unique style of shoe while touring a factory in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of Combat Flip Flops