"Rose Covered Glasses" is a serious essay, satire and photo-poetry commentary from a group of US Military Veterans in Minnesota.
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"Are we as a people — all 330 million or so of us, with all our divergent opinions, economic needs and aspirations, and beliefs about America’s role in the world — willing to resource the military arm of a fight commensurate with our political objectives?
If we are not, then the political objectives must be scaled back. This requires something more than just appetite-control; it requires statesmanship — both in dealings in foreign capitals and in committee hearing rooms at home."
"America’s two decades of involvement wouldn’t officially end until 20 months later, when the last civilian advisors from the most powerful country on earth were airlifted from the roof of their embassy in Saigon, literally chased out of the country by communists.
Numbers alone fail to capture the war’s true cost to the United States. Still, we must look: 1 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars; 150,000 wounded; more than 58,000 Americans killed.
Fast forward now to the present era, and the U.S.-Vietnam relationship is dramatically different. Vietnam was America’s 10th largest goods trading partner in 2020. According to the Department of Commerce, that same year, U.S. goods exports to Vietnam were nearly $10 billion, up 270 percent from the a decade prior. Today, Vietnam is a top ten market for U.S. food and agricultural products.
On the security front, in stark contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam now seeks to bring America into southeast Asia — to counterbalance China. One salient example among many: In 2018, Vietnam issued an unprecedented invitation to U.S. aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to make a port visit to Cam Ranh Bay — the first since the war ended in 1975.
And while the partnership between Hanoi and Washington has endured several recent missteps, that any partnership exists at all would have been unimaginable to the men fighting in the cities, jungles, and rice paddies 50 years ago.
Viewing the sacrifices of those men through the lens of today’s near-complete reversal of the strategic situation, perhaps it is only natural to ask now, five decades later, a hard question: “Was the war worth it?”
The answer depends on how we read history.
Two general camps can be described.
For the first camp, the answer is a clear “no.” While honoring the service of those who fought and died in Vietnam, the key lesson, they argue, is to remember how the dominos didn’t fall after U.S. military forces left in 1973. All of Southeast Asia didn’t turn communist. Decision-makers in the U.S. national security firmament should have given more than short shrift to inconvenient reports that contradicted calls for American involvement, like, for example, the 1964 National Board of Estimatesreport commissioned by the CIA, which concluded Domino Theory was flawed; “a continuation of the spread of Communism in the area would not be inexorable” should Vietnam fall.
For the first camp, the primary rationale for engagement was proved false. For them, the war was terrible mistake.
The second camp holds that while deeply painful and divisive, the war nevertheless bought strategic time for countries across Asia, newly emergent from colonialism, to develop the institutions and civil society they lacked and so avoid falling to communism.
For this camp, the dominoes stayed standing precisely because America sacrificed so many of her sons in Vietnam. America drew the fire, demanding resources and attention from regional communists and their Soviet backers. Those other nations were able to develop free economies which eventually became markets for American farmers and manufacturers. They also developed more or less open democratic societies with whom the United States could work on the international scene to ensure more favorable conditions for American interests. The primary rationale for fighting in Vietnam was to signal western resolve, both to friends and foes alike.
This camp answers that the war was indeed worth it — and believes that millions of free people across Asia would agree.
Which camp is right?
In philosophy, counter-factual hypotheticals hold no truth value — they are neither right nor wrong. If this holds for both politics and war, then, because the dominoes didn’t fall, we must ask different questions.
Here are three questions that national security deciders, from the E-Ring of the Pentagon to the West Wing of the White House, should consider as they assess the complicated international security landscape 50 years after American soldiers departed Vietnam:
First, are we as a people — all 330 million or so of us, with all our divergent opinions, economic needs and aspirations, and beliefs about America’s role in the world — willing to resource the military arm of a fight commensurate with our political objectives?
If we are not, then the political objectives must be scaled back. This requires something more than just appetite-control; it requires statesmanship — both in dealings in foreign capitals and in committee hearing rooms at home. Americans are still capable of this. They must remember it — and act accordingly.
Second, what consequences will foreign action have at home?
The war may have bought time for Asian countries to develop institutions and grow societal connective tissue, but it cost a rising generation of Americans their trust in their nation’s institutions and tore painfully at their social fabric. Amid the cultural chaos of the 1960s — including racial strife, assassinations, and bitterly contentious elections — the war deepened a divide, opening fault-lines within families, something I explore in my novel of the Vietnam War era “Last Summer Boys.”
On the economic front, it has been argued the billions spent on the war drove the inflation of the 1970s — which carried tectonic consequences all its own.
Walking by history’s lamp-light, today’s decision-makers must assess the impact of foreign intervention on the home-front. One area especially worth considering amid the current recruitment crisis is the impact on attitudes towards America’s military itself.
A the third and final question: How can we be worthy of the sacrifice?
Over nearly 20 years, what began with a few hundred “military advisors” under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy swelled into a bitter contest that would see more than 2.5 million American service members deployed in-country over the course of America’s involvement in the conflict.
Honoring the courage and sacrifice of America’s Vietnam War veterans means being better leaders for the young men and women serving today. And this means being exceptionally careful about committing America’s warriors to a fight.
The world is a far, far better place when Americans hold the preponderance of hard power. It is better still if their leaders use it only in gravest need, after sober analysis of their people’s true national interest. Because, when lawfully ordered, America’s men and women in uniform will unleash devastating power against the country’s enemies. And they will do so at enormous personal sacrifice.
This is the most important question of all, and the true test of whether America gets Vietnam right. It may be 50 years late.
Bill Rivers served as speechwriter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis from 2017-19. He is a fellow at the Yorktown Institute and the author of “Last Summer Boys,” an Amazon Kindle #1 bestseller in historical fiction.
I
am a Vietnam Veteran and former federal contracts manager, who has
been in the VA Health Care System for 19 years. History
and experience must be connected to yield some tough solutionstoa
project that has spanned decades without yielding results
The
expense and poor performance in the VA Healthcare records system
upgrade, recently highlighted in the Congress and the Press, reveal a
dire necessity for simplification, communication and efficiency
in processes and systems.
However,
the real root causes lie in the massive volume of war veterans
returning from our wars in the Middle East over the last two decades,
coupled with the historically poor process and systems work conducted
between the Department of Defense and the VA utilizing poorly managed
contractors taking home millions on systems specifications that
change like the wind blows.
The
news media, the auditors and the average American are pointing the
finger at the President and the Head of the VA. One cannot
ignore the accountability aspects of these individuals.
HISTORY:
After returning from two combat tours in Vietnam, I worked in the
government contracting environment for 36 years then went through the
VA system as a Veteran getting treatment at retirement in 2006. I am
in the system today.
In
2006 I found the VA had a magnificent system capable of handling
medical records and treatment anywhere in the world once a veteran
was in the system; a key point. Why have we had such
deterioration?
ANSWER: We
have not experienced deterioration in services within the VA itself,
except from pressures due to millions returning from war
coupled with COVID factors and human beings who look for excuses when
systems fail.
We
have had 2 decades of Middle East incursions, a sudden discharge of
veterans and poor management from the DOD to the VA, from the systems
contractors to the state veterans homes. Veterans fall
through the cracks as a result. We have a cost plus contracting
scenario in the form of veterans care systems mismanagement and it
will cost billions to fix.
THAT
IS THE COST OF WAR. We must have effective and timely veterans health
care or our volunteer army will disappear. Low
recruiting numbers in
the present day are demonstrating that fact.
THE
TOTAL SPECTRUM MUST BE VIEWED TO MANAGE THE ISSUES.
BACKGROUND
A
3 part special in Time Magazine in 2013 addressed the serious
gaps developing between treatment, benefits and services
processes and systems between the military services and the
Veterans Administration:
“While
awaiting processing, “the veteran’s claim sits stagnant for
up to 175 days as VA awaits transfer of complete (service
treatment records) from DoD,”:
After yearsof
work to move toward integrated electronic records that
would eliminate this sort of delay, Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel conceded in that the Defense Department was not holding up
its end of the bargain to improve the disability process.
“I
didn’t think, we knew what the hell we were doing.”:
The
above scenario is not unlike the Walter Reed Army Hospital
care fiasco a few years ago, before the facility was shut down
and consolidated with the Bethesda Naval facility.
The
VA decided to have those who would actually use the system
(claims processors) work with software developers. This process
would take longer, they estimated, but would create a system more
likely to meet the needs of those who actually use it. VA also
worked closely with major Congressional-chartered veterans’
service organizations.
2013
was the year in which regional offices were to be transitioned to the
resulting electronic system. It obviously did not occur as
planned.
In
recent years a switch to the commercial software approach through a
single company contract award without competition by the VA has been
a $16 Billion debacle. The non-compete contract was justified because
the awarded contractor already had the in-process contract for DOD
records system modernization.
Both
DOD and the Veterans Administration use service contractors to
perform this type of systems development.Government
Computer News (GCN) carried a story on the difficulties
experienced with, “Performance-Based Contracting”, which
has been made part of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) in an
attempt to pre-establish at contract award those discrete outcomes
that determine if and when a contractor will be paid.
Interestingly
enough, the article splits the blame for the difficulties right
down the middle, stating the government typically has problems
defining what it wants as an end product or outcome and looks to
contractors to define it for them. More than willing to do so,
the contractors detail specific end products or outcomes, set
schedule milestones and submit competitive proposals. The
winner is selected based on what the government thinks it needs at
the time to fulfill its requirement and a contract is negotiated.
Once underway, the government decides it wants something else
(usually a management-by-government committee phenomena with a
contractor growing his product or service by offering lots of
options).
The
resulting change of contract scope invalidates the original
price and schedule, so a whole new round of proposals and
negotiations must occur with the winner while the losers watch
something totally different evolve than that for which they
competed. The clock keeps ticking and the winner keeps getting
his monthly bill paid based on incurred cost or progress
payments.
CONCLUSION
The
present state of the economy and the needs of our servicemen
will not allow the aforementioned to continue. Government
agencies are now hard pressed to insure the most “Bang for
the Buck”. It is in the long term interests of the politician, the
DOD, the VA and astute contractors to assist in that endeavor.
(1)The
only way to achieve such an objective is through sound technical,
cost and schedule contract definition via an iterative process of
baseline management and control.
(2)
Government civil servants must be trained to report systemic poor
service up the line in lieu of hiding bad news from superiors or
developing workarounds. This must be an expectation built into
their job description and they must be rewarded and promoted for
meeting that requirement just as they are for the other requirements
of their jobs.
The
first whistle to be blown must be to the boss when the service issue
occurs, not to the press a year from the occurrence.
Government
service contracting improvement in DOD and the Veterans
Administration as well as better management of federal government
contractorsare
mandatory.There
are solutions, but they involve accountability, discipline and
change.
Our
returning soldiers and those who have served before deserve better.
"If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and
their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.
An
Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the
government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War
veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.
At the 10-year
anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, more than $40 billion a
year is going to compensate veterans and survivors from the
Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the
Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And
those costs are rising rapidly.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war's long-lasting financial toll.
"When
we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about
the cost," said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII veteran father's
disability benefits helped feed their family.
Alan Simpson, a
former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack
Obama's deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to
limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need
the money they are receiving.
"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson said.
With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of
improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of
disability payments are set to rise much higher.
The AP identified
the disability and survivor benefits during an analysis of millions of
federal payment records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
To
gauge the postwar costs of each conflict, the AP looked at four
compensation programs that identify recipients by war: disabled
veterans; survivors of those who died on active duty or from a
service-related disability; low-income wartime vets over age 65 or
disabled; and low-income survivors of wartime veterans or their disabled
children.
THE IRAQ WARS AND AFGHANISTAN
So
far, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf conflict
in the early 1990s are costing about $12 billion a year to compensate
those who have left military service or family members of those who have
died.
Those post-service compensation costs have totaled more
than $50 billion since 2003, not including expenses of medical care and
other benefits provided to veterans, and are poised to grow for many
years to come.
The new veterans are filing for disabilities at
historic rates, with about 45 percent of those from Iraq and Afghanistan
seeking compensation for injuries. Many are seeking compensation for a
variety of ailments at once.
Experts see a variety of factors
driving that surge, including a bad economy that's led more jobless
veterans to seek the financial benefits they've earned, troops who
survive wounds of war, and more awareness about head trauma and mental
health.
VIETNAM WAR
It's been 40 years since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War, and yet payments for the conflict are still rising.
Now
above $22 billion annually, Vietnam compensation costs are roughly
twice the size of the FBI's annual budget. And while many disabled
Vietnam vets have been compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder,
hearing loss or general wounds, other ailments are positioning the war
to have large costs even after veterans die.
Based on an uncertain
link to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam, federal
officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that qualifies
for cash compensation — and it is now the most compensated ailment for
Vietnam vets.
The VA also recently included heart disease among
the Vietnam medical problems that qualify, and the agency is seeing
thousands of new claims for that condition. Simpson said he has a lot of
concerns about the government agreeing to automatically compensate for
those diseases."
"The training is privately funded, by trade organizations at no cost to the veteran. Training does not cost taxpayers a dime. Union members, along with their signatory contractor partners, invest annually to fund and operate nearly 2,000 apprenticeship training facilities across North America.
"Returning home can be an overall overwhelming experience. With that said, this Veterans Day, I have a challenge for you.
Talk to a veteran, and tell that veteran that once he or she returns to civilian life, there are groups that want to help -- and, more importantly, there are viable pathways to new, fulfilling careerswaiting on them.
I lead an organization that focuses on connecting veterans to career opportunities in the construction industry: Helmets to Hardhats.
Helmets to Hardhats is a national nonprofit designed to support transitioning active-duty military service members. We work every day, in every part of the country, to ensure all service members understand that hope and opportunity await them upon their return home.
While many companies and groups claim to help employ veterans, are those veterans connected to jobs, or are they connected to careers?
There is a big difference.
This is why Helmets to Hardhats introduces transitioning service members to promising career providers and vice versa. Because that is what they deserve: careers.
Veterans must simply create a profile with us to help training directors determine what transferable skills the applicant acquired during his or her military service.
I know the challenges associated with coming home. I served in both the Navy and the Army National Guard.
This is why I am exceptionally proud of the work we do – of the apprenticeship training programs with which we are affiliated. Each of our efforts feeds into a comprehensive approach, creating viable pathways to success for our nation’s heroes.
Helmets to Hardhats has made nearly 30,000 successful career transitions thus far. That means we have helped roughly 30,000 hard-working men and women find a place in the unionized construction industry.
And our work is far from finished.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the female veteran population and the minority veteran population are both on the rise. Our organization works with all populations, including historically underserved communities and disabled veterans, to be sure all veterans have a fair shot at succeeding.
Here is how it works: Our regional managers hit the pavement each day to get more veterans registered for the federally-approved apprenticeship training of North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU). Along with our boots on the ground, we also use the digital space to ensure all veterans are aware of, not only the apprenticeship training, but also the good-paying careers associated with this training.
And no prior experience is needed. Most successful placements are veterans who begin with little to no experience in his or her chosen field.
Veterans even earn wages and benefits as they work through the earn-while-you-learn training. And, since these apprenticeship training programs are regulated and approved at both the federal and state levels, veterans can supplement their incomes by also utilizing their GI Bill benefits.
That means two checks: one from the contractor and one from the GI Bill.
In today’s hyper-partisan climate, it can be difficult to find programs that truly work, and even tougher to enjoy support from both sides of the aisle. Yet NABTU’s apprenticeship training does just that.
What’s not to like?
If you take away one piece of information after reading this, please know that this is not about finding jobs for veterans. This is about so much more. This is about connecting our brave service members to life-changing, lucrative careers.
By working alongside both labor and management, veterans are empowered to succeed – and there is no greater deed than helping a brother or sister who has served our country. So, even if you tell just one veteran, I challenge you to pass this message along:
Veterans should know that when they get home, Helmets to Hardhats is here. Apprenticeship training is available. Careers are waiting for them."
“The broken veteran narrative, unintentionally fueled by the tone of veteran legislation, certainly contributes to the real difficulties today’s veterans face in transitioning into civilian life.
The unexplored historical relationship between public perception, legislation, and veteran identity suggests that reframing veteran legislation and strengthening civilian identity may be the Joint Action Plan today’s veterans need to thrive after their service.”
“America does have a “veteran problem,” but perhaps not the one we’ve concentrated our popular attention on. Nor is today’s version unique to the 21st century. Throughout U.S. history, war generations have emphasized either the challenge veterans can pose to social stability, or the challenge commercial society can pose to the disabled veteran. Legislative solutions have been framed accordingly: The particular tone of veteran legislation has historically emphasized the disadvantages, if not “brokenness,” of veterans.
In parallel, veterans have developed their own unique sense of identity. “Veteranness” has mutated from a personality trait before the Civil War to a comprehensive sense of selfwith its own marketing brandin the post-9/11 All Volunteer Force age.
In 1944, sociologist Willard Waller was anticipating the re-civilianizing of the nearly 16 million American servicemen of World War II, many of whom would soon be in university classrooms like his at Columbia.
As long as America had had veterans, Waller pointed out in “The Veteran Comes Back,” it has had had some type of “veteran problem.” That stood to some reason:
Our kind of democratic society is probably worse fitted than any other for handling veterans. An autocracy, caring nothing for its human materials, can use up a man and throw him away. A socialistic society that takes from each according to his abilities and gives to each according to his needs can use up a man and then care for him the rest of his life. But a democracy, a competitive democracy like ours, that cares about human values but expects every man to look out for himself, uses up a man and returns him to the competitive process, then belatedly recognizes the injustice of his procedure and makes lavish gestures of atonement in his direction.
The sociologist wasn’t praising nondemocratic forms of rule. He was highlighting how the principles around which the experiment of American democracy was organized — liberty and equality, personal responsibility, private property, and limited government — exist in some legitimate tension with how such a government ought properly to acknowledge and repay individuals who have defended it.
Waller believed the real questions about veterans resuming their civilian way of life were bound up with the psychology of the soldier. Returning the soldier to civilian life in the modern world, he argued, had to start with understanding the veteran’s attitudes against the backdrop of industrial warfare, mass conscription, and a cog-in-the-machine mentality. “We must learn what it is … to be, for a time, expendable, and then to be expendable no more.” What happens, he wondered, when the “expendable one” returns from facing death?
George Washington had puzzled over a similar difficulty. The commander of the Continental Army felt intuitively that veterans needed to maintain a sense of self after military service. In his Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States, Washington recommended that veterans funnel their energies as soon as possible into active pursuits, and “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as Citizens, than they [were] persevering and victorious as soldiers.”
Washington’s insight was that soldiers cannot simply remain ex-soldiers once their period of service is fulfilled. He knew that soldiers “walk the weird wall at the edge of civilization,” as Reed Robert Bonnadona puts it: The people who have historically been the staunchest defenders of their societies have also sometimes posed the greatest threat to it. From this juxtaposition Washington formed his idea that the citizen-turned-soldier could — and must — turn back into the citizen again.
For Washington, ex-soldiers’ veteran status was only one (temporary) part of their American identity. This was a crucial plank of his argument that the new nation could have a professional army without endangering the liberties of citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville gave the more explicit explanation several decades later, when he showed why the American soldier displays “a faithful image of the nation.” Most democratic citizens would rather reserve their passions and ambitions for civilian life than for martial grandeur, he wrote, because they think of military service as at most a passing obligation, not an identity. “They bow to their military duties, but their souls remain attached to the interests and desires they were filled with in civil life.”
In the era of Washington and Tocqueville, American veterans were not an alien faction different from society at large. Since then, however, the end of each subsequent conflict has spurred the public to think of ex-soldiers as a discrete group with certain special claims on society’s gratitude. The War of 1812 cemented the outcome of the Revolution and gave Americans a renewed sense of their independence. The public’s attention turned to appreciate the role of the Continental Army. The aging of the surviving soldiers and some public romanticizing of their personsas archetypes of national character, led to a public movement in favor of pensions for the neglected “suffering soldier.” The “suffering soldier” became such a powerful public trope that even though the Senate invoked 40 years of accepted republican principle about pension establishments being aristocratic and corruption-prone, President James Monroe signed the Revolutionary War Pension Act in 1818. The legislation fused the idea of a service pension to the concept of public assistance for the aged poor, laying the groundwork for how the system of American military service-related benefits would evolve.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the changing face of industrialized society, technologies of war, and beliefs about the role of government have expanded each generation’s understanding of its debtto soldiers. The early practice of granting only disability pensionsto war veterans grew toinclude professional or vocational training after World War I, to college tuition assistance and low-interest home loansafter World War II. Finally, these benefits were expanded to all who have served in uniform,whether during war or peacetime. At the same time, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs expanded the paradigm of government’s obligations to all citizens. Nevertheless, today, there are those who would extend the above-mentioned benefits even to soldiers with an “Other Than Honorable” discharge — reflecting how much veteran identity has come to be wedded to a legal status premised on the perceived cost of service. The pension/benefits narrative has corralled anyone who has worn a uniform into a unique category of society in the eyes of the public.
The way veterans have responded to their evolving status has both reflected and informed national attitudes. Largely because of the sheer numbers involved in the Civil War and, especially, in World War I, soldiers who had survived these massive conflicts, protracted campaigns, and deadlier weapons began to think of themselves more narrowly — as survivors of epic experiences who would forever have more in common with those who had seen such killing fields than with civilians who had not.John A. Casey charts this transformation in “New Men,” showing that whereas former soldiers and civilians alike once viewed military service more as an episode in a man’s life and a set of acquired skills that all could appreciate, in the post-bellum era both groups began to view service as a transformative experience that produced a new identity, one civilians couldn’t interpret.
Historians and military scholars debate exactly how different the Civil War was from prior conflicts. Casey argues that “it is the changed rhythm of war more than anything that marks it as different.” While more traditional set-piece battles marked the early campaigns of the war, the last two years witnessed nearly continuous fighting. Soldiers had no time to conceptualize what they had lived through or to recuperate. This “changed them in ways they never completely understood. All that was certain was they could not fully return to their antebellum sense of identity … They had been baptized by war and born again as new men.”
For Casey, the Civil War was when veterans and civilians changed their conception of war from an event to a liminal experience transforming the warfighter’s consciousness, analogous to religious conversion. It was Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes wholikened combat to being “touched by fire,” like the Apostles. The postbellum trail of fiction and nonfiction writings authored by veterans illustrate this mindset. William Tecumseh Sherman’s “Memoirs,” Sam Watkins’s “Company Aytch,” andAmbrose Bierce’s stories all evince a struggle to find coherence in the traumatic events the authors experienced, a struggle to show the “real” war, and a sense of the inadequacy of their portrayal to make the uninitiated civilian reader “get it.”
Civil War veterans such John William De Forest (“Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty”), and Winslow Homer (“The Empty Sleeve at Newport”) also showed this literary and artistic consciousness at work. Lanier’s protagonist, Confederate veteran Phil Sterling, is a number rather than a name, his identity shattered by incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp. Once released, the love of friends and family enables Sterling to recover his name and identity, but his combat experiences prevent him from feeling “at home.” Spectators of the same war, but not participants in it, Sterling’s loved ones cannot truly understand him.
“War literature” as a unique field of academic study is generally considered to have originated in the wake of the Civil War, Casey writes. These ex-soldiers presented wartime memories as something they alone could discuss, forging the path for how the Ernest Hemingways and other, more familiar “Lost Generation” soldier-poets of World War I wrote about war and the fighting man, establishing a now-defined genre.
It was this newer understanding of the veteran as a psychological identity, earned in the crucible of war, that Waller had in mind in 1944 when he asked what happens when “the expendable one returns.” Like Washington, Waller thought a transition back into the civilian community was both possible and essential, but he believed that post-service education would be key. Education, he argued, would give the soldier the mental tools with which to make sense of his warfighting experience juxtaposed against his perception of the civilian’s perspective.
Although Waller didn’t live to witness the effects of the 1944 GI Bill — the “Serviceman’s Readjustment Act” — the bill supported Waller’s theory and is widely considered to be one of the most successful pieces of legislation in American history (so successful that Great Society programs were patterned off it). Through its education and vocational training assistance and small business loans, the GI Bill helped millions of ex-soldiers bridge their war experience back to the civilian sector, to thenet enrichment of their families and civil society. The absence of a public discussion of a postwar “veteran problem,” in comparison to the post-World War I and Civil War eras, reflects the success of the legislation.
In the decades since World War II, society has moved well past Washington and Waller’s viewpoints about post-service identity. Thanks to the cultural conflicts of the Vietnam era, the rise of identity politics, the medicalization of behavior, and the valorization of victimhood, in the era of the professionalized All-Volunteer Force, veterans are viewed as a “tribe apart.” Their increasingly medicalized imageis linked to the relatively new field of neuropsychiatry. After Vietnam, Hollywood helped promulgate a perception of veterans as “walking time bombs.” This view was reinforced by front-page stories in the New York Times proclaiming veterans to be “psychiatric casualties of war.”
In the late 1970s and 1980s, an extreme version of this diagnosis was crowned with scientific gravitas when a group of activist-psychiatrists led by the prominentRobert Jay Liftontestified that the veteran “returns as a tainted intruder … likely to seek continuing outlets for a pattern of violence to which they have become habituated.” Popular culture painted soldiers as “baby killers.”Within a generation, ex-soldiers in the public consciousness went from needing education to needing to be “rehumaniz[ed],” as Lifton put it.
A second reason for the continued valorization of veterans follows from this last: Americans may have lost the robust sense of citizenship that previous generations relied on to make civilian life vibrant enough for veterans to embrace it. In the All-Volunteer Force era, perhaps it’s the civilian majority with its loose sense of civic connectedness that makes it difficult for veterans to subsume a veteran identity within the generalized civilian one. When Washington argued for former soldiers to think of themselves as fully civilian-citizens with a set of acquired military skills, many Americans felt a sense of patriotism and civic identity that shaped the calendar of their yearly activities.Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham may have over-eulogized this civic engagement in “Stump Speaking” and “County Election;” nevertheless, that strong sense seems to have weakened considerably since the 19th century. Today’s America no longer shares that identity, as suggested by factors from low voter turnout, “Man on the Street”-style public confessions of civic and historical ignorance, disinterest in civic education, to the “bowling alone” culture decried by Harvard’s Robert Putnam. In Putnam’s view, the comparably steep membership losses since the 1960s among trade unions, professional associations, chapter-based voluntary membership federations, and community groups documents “the erosion of America’s social connectedness and community involvement.” This is to say nothing of the 2016 election, whose after-action report notes the role that a hollowed-out sense of citizenship thanks to globalization played in the electoral returns.
To that first generation of Americans, citizenship wasn’t a passive label, but an active way of life. Jefferson relayed the sense of this understanding in his comment that citizenship is composed of the civic knowledge of rights, duties, and how to judge individuals worthy of public office; the practice of sound civic habits; and importantly, an informed attachment to the American regime and principles of the Constitution.
America’s political class today doesn’t exactly articulate this. As that California teacher’s rant shows, angry citizens are present in all layers of society. But we have little corresponding understanding of a robust citizenship animated by an informed attachment to American laws, principles and institutions, and the need for each generation to perpetuate them. It may not be possible — or preferable given the dynamics of today’s professional All-Volunteer Force — to return entirely to Washington’s designation of the veteran as simply the citizen. But it is both possible and pressing to return to that robust sense of citizenship that enabled citizens to be soldiers, and soldiers citizens.”
Rebecca Burgess manages the Program on American Citizenship at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on veterans and their role in civil society and politics. She is the author of “Second Service: Military Veterans and Public Office.”
