2015 May 26^th

(…and 2016 May 30th

Memorial Day is over. It is instructive to look back at the public’s attitude toward military veterans over the years. The 16 million veterans serving in WW 2 never heard “Thank you for your service” when they first came home. I never heard that during the first sixty-five years following my discharge from the Army Air Force after WW 2. The veterans then did what we thought we needed to do. There was no more expectation of a “thank you” then than for our children to say thank you for their dinner.

 The Korean War (excuse me, police action) was about the same. Except that MacArthur was so full of himself and eager to nuclear bomb China, that Uncle Harry had to cut him down a bit. There were 5.7 million veterans of that war and those veterans were largely ignored when they came home. They got the GI Bill and other help but no one thanked them for their service when they came back. A few people thought that we had no business opposing the North Koreans or their assistants, the Chinese, when they invaded South Korea; if they thought that they kept quiet about it.

The next major conflict was in Viet Nam and that was a very different scenario.  We began there by trying to salvage French interests. (French Indo-China) This escalated when we were told that the whole region would become communist if we did not roll back the North Vietnamese. Perhaps another hundred thousand troops would be needed. There were never enough; by 1968 the number of troops in Viet Nam was over half a million and 65 percent of those were draftees. The draft was enormously unpopular; if you were smart enough and reasonably wealthy you could get a deferment until you finished college and if you majored in religion and became a preacher with your own church your deferment was permanent. If that didn’t work you moved to Canada.

A large part of the problem was that the administration was not telling the public the truth about the war. This, along with other problems, led to the war’s unpopularity. The unpopularity finally led to some members of the public literally spitting on returning service men. Poor training and poorer leadership sometimes led to barbaric actions in Viet Nam by American soldiers. The public, after learning about the My Lai massacre, was not favorably impressed by American troops. In one case a young woman meeting her husband’s casket was told that he deserved what he got! There was no “thank you for your service” for these returning veterans.

Now comes the all-volunteer army; on closer examination the “volunteering” is really bought and paid for. The government now provides enormous incentives to young men and women if they volunteer for military service. If you serve for three years, even if you never see combat, you are entitled to 27 months of college tuition (that’s four years of college) and additional financial support while you’re in school. There are other incentives besides college. Keep in mind that the odds of being shot if you serve three years in the military are slightly less that the odds of being shot if you were a civilian of that age.  Make no mistake; some do enlist in the service for largely patriotic reasons.  So we should thank these volunteers for their service just as we should thank the Chinese for buying the bonds that finance our wars, wars that we refuse to pay for with increased taxes, thanks to propaganda from the right wing and from Grover Norquist.

A follow up: at the end of WW 2 privates earned $54/mo. Adjusted for today’s inflation that would now be $717/mo. Today’s new service enlistee earns $1531/mo., but gets a raise after just four months. What’s not to like about the new Army?