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This chapter examines the process of leaving Korea and what happened to veterans once they returned to the home front. In contrast to previous wars, Korean War veterans returned home individually, rotating out after collecting a set number of points based on length and type of service in country. Some were greeted with parades or welcoming bands, but most experienced a quieter homecoming. Instead of celebrating the end of the war as in 1945, Americans gave little thought to it and seemed anxious to simply put Korea behind them as soon as possible. Congress passed a Korean GI Bill in 1952, but it was less generous than that of World War II in its readjustment benefits. This chapter considers the problems and issues that Korean War veterans had to deal with upon their return to their homeland and in trying to readjust to civilian life, including those relating to compensation and other benefits, employment, posttraumatic stress disorder, physical impairments and injuries, and segregation.

The American soldier figured prominently in the civil religious crisis of the Vietnam War, both as an interpreter of war and as a symbol of the nation’s moral standing and ethical capacities. This chapter examines governmental and popular presentations of the Vietnam-era soldier and argues that these presentations often featured divergent interpretations of the relationship between the soldier and the government, whose will he embodied. In civil religious terms this was a Christological controversy, paralleling disagreements in the early Church over the precise nature of the incarnation and the saving work of the Christ figure. In the end, the purity of soldierly service and sacrifice was maintained through removal of the stain of compulsion from soldiering for America.

This chapter explores the political debates surrounding the passage of the 1966 Cold War G.I. Bill, the first G.I. bill of the Vietnam era. Unlike the earlier World War II and Korean Conflict wartime G.I. bills, the 1966 bill covered all noncombat Cold War veterans and, therefore, proved to be far less generous. Politicians from Great Society liberals to fiscal conservatives deemed that these later veterans had not earned the right to more substantial benefits because they had not faced fire directly. The bill made no distinction between veterans serving in peacetime conditions and Vietnam combat veterans. Consequently, Vietnam veterans were left with a G.I. bill significantly less generous than the one awarded to their predecessors. This chapter reveals how the 1966 bill fell prey to the nuances of both the liberal and conservative economic philosophies of the mid-twentieth century and left a legacy of bitterness among Vietnam veterans.

This chapter focuses on the lives of Korean War veterans in recent years. In particular, it considers the efforts of these soldiers to rekindle their veteran identity and to seek wider recognition for their service in Korea, in part by forming organizations such as the Chosin Few and the Korean War Veterans Association. It also examines the Korean War veterans' successful lobbying for a national memorial and for Veterans Administration medical benefits. Finally, it evaluates what these veterans think of the Korean War sixty years after, and in light of South Korea's progress and the greater willingness of Americans to recognize the sacrifices of those who served in the Far East in early the 1950s.

By 1970 the orthodox narrative of the “senseless” First World War was so firmly entrenched that it permeated all works on the subject during this time, which consistently maintained that the Christmas truce proved that the British soldiers who served on the Western Front would have preferred to make peace with the Germans rather than fight them. Veterans of the war who were interviewed after 1970 increasingly subscribed to these myths of the truce, proving the dominance of the war’s conventional narrative for even those who had participated in the event, and demonstrating the new emphasis on social history, wherein the words of participants are used to prove a narrative. This chapter ends with the ultimate manifestation of the First World War in popular culture, the television series Blackadder Goes Forth, which featured the truce in its final episode.

This chapter examines the development of veterans' policy and the establishment of the World War I veterans' organizations between 1917 and 1929. It recounts the creation of the progressive-minded World War veterans system, then turns to the transformations in federal veterans' policy prompted by the lobbying power of veterans, especially the two legislative landmarks passed in 1924: the World War Veterans Act and the Adjusted Service Compensation Act. Before 1929, Republican hegemony in Congress and in the White House, coupled with American Legion dominance in veterans' affairs, made conditions unfavorable for the politics of veterans' issues to spill over into larger political battles. But, in 1929, dissatisfaction with federal Bonus and pension policies empowered a new organizational voice in World War veterans' issues just as the ebullience of the 1920s came to an abrupt, shattering end.

This chapter examines how veterans pushed to expand and police the boundaries of welfare state programs that targeted veterans and specifically focuses on the battles fought over national amputation and prosthetic programs during and immediately after World War II. Veterans and their organizations worked to maintain their separate and special status as deserving welfare recipients and rejected attempts to create universal disability policies. In the realm of amputation and prosthetic policy, veterans and veterans’ organizations condemned the poor policies, planning, and prosthetics that formed the core of the U.S. amputation and prosthetic programs. They demanded specialized care and research programs administered through the Veterans Administration and the military. Because of their service and sacrifices, veterans argued, the U.S. government owed them first and free access to the best prosthetic devices science could develop.

This chapter examines the role of Vietnam veterans in the legislative story of the G.I. Bills, with particular emphasis on the difficulties they encountered in organizing as a coherent lobbying force. While the calls for an improved G.I. Bill were addressed in Congress and covered by the press, Vietnam War veterans seemed to be either reluctant or unable to organize into a coherent force that could put significant pressure on lawmakers trying to derail their readjustment. There ware few large-scale national organizations to promote the specific needs of returning Vietnam veterans. Perhaps the most visible Vietnam veterans' group was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). This chapter considers the experience of returning veterans as college students in various campuses as well as their academic performance. It shows that most veterans did not face overt hostility from their fellow students and, while not attaining the same profile or notoriety on campus as World War II veterans, demonstrated a similar devotion to their studies and a similar academic excellence.

This chapter switches perspective again and takes as its object the veterans themselves. When looked at through an ethnographical lens, World War I veterans appear to have been ambiguous heroes on reservations. They were honored but at the same time elicited mistrust, jealousy, and attempts on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as on the part of their own communities, to control and direct their behavior. Honoring veterans was an opportunity to reaffirm community bonds and bolster Indians' status vis-à-vis whites. But celebrations could also be rituals to manage fears and distrust toward the veterans themselves. Thus, their identity as a group developed as much from local cultural traditions as from this ambivalent position on reservations, alternately central and marginal.

This chapter demonstrates how ardent Filipino American youth, many socialized in faith-influenced family relations and schooling, have joined forces with their parents' and grandparents' generations to tackle certain social injustices. It focuses on the critical role played by Filipino faithful and their spiritual communities in the pursuit of justice for Filipino World War II veterans and around extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. It discusses the strategies these Filipino American youth used to convince the larger American public and the global community to join them in planning and launching intergenerational counterhegemonic activities, or bayanihan initiatives. These activities have included protest marches, letter-writing campaigns, testifying before Senate and House committees, and candlelight vigils.

During and after the Civil War, Union army soldiers and veterans attempted to make sense of their military camping experiences, which could exemplify generational camaraderie, political organization, and national belonging. This chapter follows the career of John Mead Gould, a soldier from Portland, Maine who kept an extensive diary and published a camping manual in 1877. It also discusses the role of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization that organized reunions in the form of annual encampments as part of a campaign to lobby the government for veterans’ pensions. Its form of camping put forward the veteran as a new exemplar of the ideal citizen for a modern commercial age. Veterans claimed a meaningful place in a world where the nation’s social and economic underpinnings were in flux and understandings of citizenship, manhood, work, and success were shifting under their feet.

This book explores the upbringing, military training, wartime experiences, attitudes, and post-Korea lives of Americans who served in the Korean War. It examines the impact of the Korean War on veterans and on the world to which they returned. It also considers the various circumstances that compelled Americans to accept military service and join the armed forces in the early 1950s, along with the experiences of American prisoners of war captured by the enemies. It also discusses recent efforts by Korean War veterans to rekindle their veteran identity and to seek wider recognition for their service, such as forming organizations like the Chosin Few and the Korean War Veterans Association, as well as lobbying for a national memorial and for Veterans Administration medical benefits.

This chapter describes the impact of the Civil War on the Cynthiana and Harrison County, Ky. Subjects include: War claims submitted by attorney William S. Haviland; a duel between a former Yankee and Rebel; founding of Battle Grove Cemetery on the site of a battle; the first Confederate monument in Kentucky; Civil War veterans’ organizations and reunions in Harrison County; rebuilding of the burned downtown; newspaper editor urged reconciliation; Burbridge vilified for reprisal shootings; Civil War correspondence; and Harrison County Freedmen’s Bureau activities. This chapter also reveals details of Cynthiana attorney William W. Cleary’s role in the Confederate Secret Service operations in Canada as secretary to a Confederate commissioner. After Lincoln’s assassination Cleary and the other agents were implicated by circumstantial evidence after being seen meeting John Wilkes Booth in Canada, but charges of conspiracy to kill Lincoln were later dropped for lack of evidence.

The Sisters of Christian Doctrine opened their first social settlement, Madonna House, in 1910 on the Lower East Side of New York City. The sisters operated a day nursery and kindergarten for children whose mothers worked outside of the home and offered a variety of social, educational, and religious activities, some of which were directed towards specific ethnic constituencies. Their primary work, however, was with their Italian neighbors who attended St. Joachim's Church, an Italian national parish. This ministry led to conflicts with Father Vincent Januzzi, St. Joachim's pastor. Because Mother Marianne believed that the immigrants with whom they worked needed to support their adopted country, she founded the Columbus Volunteers to train young men for service in the armed forces. When the United States entered World War I, the Sisters of Christian Doctrine ministered to veterans suffering from a variety of disabilities.

This chapter examines the generational background of Korean War veterans. Raised during the Great Depression and World War II, the men and women who served in the Korean War learned first-hand the sacrifices that Americans might be called upon to make in the name of country. Following the defeat of the Nazis and Japanese, however, few expected that one day they would be asked by the U.S. government to participate in a ground war of their own. Still, situated between World War II and the Vietnam War, this generation chose to show their patriotism by accepting military service instead of avoiding the draft and shunning volunteering the way their sons and daughters did in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter examines the issuance of nonmarketable Treasury debt in the second half of the 1930s. It begins by describing an early example of a government trust fund and the first instance of a trust fund investing in special issue debt. The latter set an important precedent for later, much larger, trust funds and played a crucial role in the complicated history of bonus payments (during the 1930s) to veterans of World War I. The chapter then turns to the mechanics of the two trust funds established by the Social Security Act. It concludes with a discussion of the very different savings bond program.

Chapter four explores how the symptoms of war trauma have been transferred onto Chandler’s protagonist Philip Marlowe. Marlowe’s character traits will be closely examined by considering certain notable features such as the detective’s origins, characterization, disillusionment and his chivalric code of honour. Like Chandler, it becomes possible to identify the small but distinctive aspects of Marlowe’s character that suggest that he was a psychologically damaged war veteran fighting new battles on a different front.

In addition to Marlowe, Chandler’s other veteran characters also unwittingly suffer post-traumatic symptoms, and chapter six is an exploration of the most significant of Chandler’s novels and the work that best represents his protagonist as a veteran, The Long Goodbye (1953). Examining Marlowe’s behaviour around, and attitude towards, the two veterans identified in the novel, Roger Wade and Terry Lennox, it is argued that Marlowe becomes part of a “band of brothers,” an intimate group of veterans in whose company the detective displays the undeniable evidence of his past experiences and trauma.