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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.

This chapter look at cases that complicate any simple correlation between victorious wars and veterans' high postwar status. It examines the United States and the United Kingdom after World War I, the United Kingdom after World War II, Soviet veterans after both world wars, and China. It also elaborates how victory did not prevent many former soldiers from feeling betrayed by their governments, and often by society as well. The chapter discusses American World War I veterans that point to some gains after a limited contribution to the war effort and after many years of agitation. It describes the United Kingdom, long-suffering frontoviki in the USSR, and China's veterans that languished in obscurity for decades despite having paid a far higher price for their victory.

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.

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 traces the history of federal debates over war veterans' benefits from the early Republic to the Vietnam era. After discussing the origins of offering compensation for the hazards of military service, the chapter considers the evolution of the G.I. Bills and the controversies surrounding them. It shows that, for ideological and economic reasons, the provision of veterans' benefits has been a contested issue in American politics since the Civil War. It also examines arguments by politicians from Thomas Jefferson through Franklin D. Roosevelt that military service should be a natural obligation of citizenship rather than a basis for ongoing federal benefits, along with claims that the cost of benefits placed an unnecessary financial burden on the government. Finally, it explains how the enactment of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 paved the way for a model that provides benefits to future generations of veterans.

This chapter examines the political debates that accompanied the passage of the first of the Vietnam-era G.I. Bills, the Veterans' Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966. It considers the role of Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, a Texas Democrat, in pushing for a new G.I. Bill that would compensate all citizens called upon for military service and the opposition he faced from fellow Texan Democrat Olin Teague in the House. In particular, it explains how the Vietnam War helped Yarborough's cause, resulting in the Veterans' Readjustment Benefits Act that gave the same benefits to all Cold War veterans. It also discusses the arguments of President Lyndon B. Johnson regarding federal spending and his eventual signing of the bill into law. Finally, it reflects on the significance of the 1966 G.I. Bill with respect to veterans' benefits and to democratic citizenship more generally.

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 reexamines the Bonus March by exploring the organized efforts carried out by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) for full and immediate payment of the bonus. In doing so, the essay argues that the supposedly unprompted Bonus Army that moved on Washington in the summer of 1932 was in actuality responding to organized political activism orchestrated by the VFW. The chapter also argues that, moreover, by viewing the growth of the VFW and the origins of the march in tandem, the symbiotic relationship between federal policy and voluntary associations can be examined. The federal policy that outlined the Bonus's deferred features inadvertently led to the rapid political mobilization by veterans. When the largest of the veteran organizations, the American Legion, failed to challenge federal policy, veterans first flowed into the VFW and then onto the streets of the capital. In short, the federal policies aimed at benefiting veterans inadvertently transformed them into activist citizens.

Based on alumni interviews, this chapter reports on the mental and physical health functioning of alumni, thus providing more empirical data about the short-term and long-term functioning of maltreated youth who were placed in foster care. The primary hypothesis was that alumni would exhibit mental and physical health difficulties that would be more severe than those of the general population.

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 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 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 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.

This chapter examines veterans' initial reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The 1933 Economy Act, the second piece of legislation passed in the New Deal's “Hundred Days,” had reduced veteran benefits by more than $400 million. In response to the Economy Act, many veterans immediately broke ranks with the Roosevelt administration and questioned the authenticity of the New Deal's claims to helping the forgotten man. Members of both the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion expressed outrage at this piece of legislation and its implementation by the administration. In their forceful response to the Economy Act, veterans, in particular those in the VFW, joined with other early critics of the New Deal who chastised FDR's unwillingness to reconfigure the nation's political economy.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed background of events preceding the land seizure era. It details how ZANU-PF found itself facing a rebellion from Liberation War veterans in the late 1990s as the national economy foundered, and as a result, the party began making ever greater promises about land redistribution to appease this constituency. It shows that the government was aware of how important the agricultural industry was to the nation’s economy, and was cautious about disrupting it. It also explains how the dramatic rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, culminating in the loss of the referendum in February 2000, forced the government into taking drastic action to preserve its political power. The chapter casts doubt on the claims that there was widespread desire for land from the general populace as the country entered the new millennium.

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 explores the Bonus March as the starting point of New Deal-era veteran politics. In this vein, the supposedly unprompted Bonus Army that moved on Washington in the summer of 1932 actually responded to organized political activism orchestrated by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VWF) between 1929 and 1932. The federal policy that outlined the Bonus's deferred features inadvertently led to the rapid political mobilization by veterans. When the largest of the veteran organizations, the American Legion, failed to challenge federal policy, veterans first flowed into the VWF and then onto the streets of the capital. In short, the federal policies aimed at benefiting veterans instead transformed them into activist citizens.

This concluding chapter explores the veteran organizations' rivalry and the creation of the GI Bill in light of New Deal-era veteran political activism. During World War II, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) originally supported a new Bonus policy for returning veterans, however, it was the American Legion (AL) that pushed for expansive GI Bill benefits. The competition between these organizations drove the AL to outdo its fierce rival for the allegiance of World War II veterans. Competition for new members and for the new bureaucratic jobs that an expanding federal veteran welfare system might create moved the AL to promote a federal policy antithetical to its founders' avowed conservatism. And, while federal veterans' policy as written in the GI Bill emerged as a symbol of the new path postwar liberalism might take, it also cemented the dominant position of the AL and the VFW as the cornerstones of the twentieth-century veterans' lobby.

This introductory chapter examines the transformation of veteran policies throughout the interwar years, one that paralleled the changes to twentieth-century American liberalism during the same period. The sweeping Bonus-March-to-GI-Bill narrative is briefly summarized and hence contextualized into the spheres of federal veterans' policy, institutional rivalries between the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, and the larger political milieu. Interwar federal policies had provoked repeated political mobilizations by veterans and veteran organizations seeking to reverse or amend those policy decisions. Elected officials in Congress, bureaucrats, and presidents were all forced to conceptualize and implement veterans policy—and in many cases, to reconceptualize it and re-implement it—in response to the strength of veteran organizations' political activism and in deference to the “soldiers' vote.” In the process, veteran issues and veteran politics drew to the epicenter of larger political battles.