America's Veterans After Combat Service

It has been said that the way you dishonor a warrior is to deny them the dignity of their experience. My journey into how America has dealt with our veterans comes out of my personal experience as a Vietnam veteran coming home in 1969 and my more recent two year stint as the Director of Military and Veterans Services at the University of Central Missouri.

The two essential questions that our veterans always deal with are: 1. who am I now, and 2. what is my lane in life going forward (what am I going to do that will provide meaning and purpose to my life). As I have immersed myself deeply into America’s actual history of how we have received our veterans back over decades, I’ve learned a great deal. Until my last four years as CEO of 1 Vet At A Time, I naively thought that our nation pretty much always and earnestly worked to help our veterans get their bearings, move ahead productively, etc. I thought that WW II was the high-water mark in doing it right and Vietnam was our county’s most shameful example of outright hostility, denigration and mockery towards our returning veterans.

If you would like to become better informed, let me suggest the two eye-opening books:

*  The Wages of War (When America's Soldiers Came Home / From Valley Forge To Vietnam) by Richard Severo & Lewis Milford - Simon and Schuster

*  Marching Home (Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War) by Brian Matthew Jordan - Liveright Publishing Corporation .

Both of these books are well researched and present a sad-to-shocking scenario of how our veterans have traditionally been so shabbily treated and dishonored once they returned home from war.

We’ve been at war now for 16+ years...unprecedented. We will be at war with Islam for decades ahead. We are trying to do this nowadays with a frayed all-volunteer force that represents less than .5 % of our entire populace. There is a reckoning coming. In the meantime, our veterans are, and have always been, “in the breech” for us all.

America has a bi-partisan, checkered history as to the treatment of our veterans post-combat. Chances are...current rhetoric aside (“veteran friendly”, “thank you for your service” etc.)...we will continue missing the mark. That is because too few Americans serve our nation in our armed forces (less than .5%) and therefore 99% of all Americans are too far removed from the sacrifices and lifelong consequences for those few who are standing in the gap for us all.