Veterans

Veterans OverviewRevolutionary WarCivil WarWorld War IWorld War IIKorean WarVietnam War
Veterans: Overview Two major changes have taken place in the relation of the American veteran to civilian society, especially since 1865: the growth of veterans' groups as nationalist lobbies, and the rapid expansion of a military pension system that some scholars see as the template for the twentieth‐ century American welfare state. Even before the Revolutionary War ended, however, questions of veteran/civilian relations had arisen. In 1776, the Continental Congress pensioned veterans disabled in war, but beyond this step (which had long colonial and English precedents) there was sharp disagreement. Some representatives embraced the ideal of the civilian volunteer, and argued that the service pensions Congress had promised in 1778 represented an entering wedge for standing armies. Such worries were heightened when officers of Washington's army encamped at Newburgh, New York, demanded pensions or a cash equivalent as the price of their disbandment in 1783, and formed a hereditary order, the Society of the Cincinnati. Among enlisted personnel, indigent veterans would finally be pensioned in 1818, but full service pensions did not arrive until 1832. Thus, from its inception, the U.S. military pension system drew distinctions between three classes of the deserving: war invalids; indigent “dependents”; and soldiers whose only claim to benefits was their service.

As a result of the Newburgh remonstrances, Congress, in the Commutation Act of 1783, provided officers with five years' full pay in lieu of half‐pay pensions for life. Because the federal government continued in default until 1791, however, many officers sold their commutation certificates for as little as 12 1/2 cents on the dollar, a fate that also befell many enlisted veteran holders of Continental land warrants. Under acts of 1776 and 1780, Congress had promised the veterans large tracts of the public domain, mostly in the Northwest and Southwest territories; land‐rich states such as Virginia and New York made additional grants. But conflicting state land claims, wars with Indian nations, and land sales restrictions made land warrants of small value to most veterans until the late 1790s, by which time most had sold their warrants to speculators. Eventually, title to 2,666,080 acres of public lands was issued on the basis of Revolutionary claims.

Revolutionary War veterans never organized for mass politics and had little public visibility in the early republic. Many of the estimated 232,000 men who served had been militiamen, whose irregular, seasonal war service produced scant national consciousness (it also excluded them from pension benefits, much to the disgust of those who saw volunteer militias as bulwarks of liberty). Even Continental regulars often had little contact with soldiers from states other than their own, and consequently Revolutionary veterans' organizations were limited in scope. The Society of the Cincinnati declined to only six state chapters, all in the Northeast, by 1832; the Society of St. Tammany, founded by New York City veterans in 1789, quickly evolved into a Democratic political club.

The wars of the early nineteenth century likewise produced few veterans' groups, in part because they produced few veterans: 28,186 were demobilized from the War of 1812, 139,036 from the Mexican War. A tiny Society of the War of 1812 led a fitful existence from 1853 into the 1890s, when it became a hereditary order; the National Association of Mexican War Veterans was not formed until 1874, and lasted barely into the twentieth century. Veterans of both wars benefited immediately from federal land grants and invalid pensions, but dependent and service pensions came only as part of the tremendous pension rush following the Civil War—to War of 1812 veterans in 1871 and to Mexican War veterans in 1887 (dependent) and 1907 (service). Because most Mexican War volunteers had been southerners, there was great resistance to pensioning them in the post–Civil War era, and the law of 1887 excluded those whose wounds had been sustained in Confederate service or who were politically disbarred by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Civil War revolutionized the relationship of veteran to society. The number of troops involved was unprecedented: at least 2 million men fought for the Union, some 750,000 for the Confederacy. More important, veterans of the Union army in 1866 created a powerful mass organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), to lobby for their interests and promote loyalty to the nation‐state. Nearly every Northern town had a GAR post, and with more than 400,000 members by 1890, the GAR was a voting machine for the Republican Party. Politicians of both parties vied for the veterans' favor with generous pension legislation, especially the Arrears Act (1879) and Dependent Pension Act (1890), the latter granting a virtual service pension to Union veterans at a time when many were still in their fifties. By 1891, military pensions accounted for one dollar of every three spent by the federal government, and at the peak in 1902, 999,446 persons (including widows and dependents) were on the pension rolls. By 1917, the nation had spent approximately $5 billion on Civil War pensions. Reformers attacked the frauds that riddled this system.

Beyond pensions, Civil War veterans occupied the center of a postwar culture that in each region venerated its ex‐soldiers. In the North, cities erected expensive monuments; Gettysburg was preserved as a historical park; and Grand Army men lectured schoolchildren on patriotic holidays, including Memorial Day, first proclaimed by GAR commander in chief John Logan in 1868 to honor the Union dead. By 1888, twelve northern states and the federal government had erected soldiers' homes. Union veterans won land grants, special treatment under the Homestead Act, and preference in hiring—by law in some states, de facto in federal agencies such as the Pension Bureau. The most important aspect of Union veteran culture, however, was its intensely conservative nationalism, visible in the GAR's crusades against anarchy, flag desecration, and “impure” school textbooks in the 1890s. Veterans of the Union army were the first to assert a privileged relation to the national state.

In the South, Confederate veterans organized late, at least partly in reaction to the GAR. Barred from federal entitlements, they obtained pensions and soldiers' homes from most southern states, though such benefits usually were quite modest. (Georgia's Confederate disability pensions, for example, averaged 14% of the federal rate.) The United Confederate Veterans (1889) presided over a veteran culture that shifted ground from intransigence in the 1870s to a romantic “Lost Cause” sensibility in the 1890s that even Union veterans could accept with some reservations.

The legacy of Civil War veterans was immense. First, the Civil War pension system provided the United States's first significant encounter with entitlement spending. When other groups—mothers, workers, the unemployed—sought state aid after 1900, their claims were evaluated in light of the partisanship, nationalistic rhetoric, and fraud that had characterized the Civil War system. Second, the GAR provided an organizational model and political agenda that twentieth‐century veterans' groups copied. Founded after World War I, the American Legion adopted the GAR's internal structure and consulted with aging GAR members on political strategy. All veterans' organizations until the Vietnam War continued the GAR program of flag ritualism, “patriotic instruction,” and unqualified nationalism.

The Spanish‐American War produced only two significant organizations: the United Spanish War Veterans (1904), which soon faded, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), founded in 1913. Unlike the GAR and United Confederate Veterans, the VFW admitted all overseas veterans, not just those from one war, a policy that has allowed it to persevere to the present. On the other hand, the VFW policy of limiting membership to overseas veterans initially hampered the organization in competition with the more inclusive American Legion.

The approximately 4 million veterans of World War I returned to a situation markedly different from that following the Civil War. High unemployment marked both periods, but the soldiers of 1865 came back mostly to farms, while those of 1919 returned primarily to cities, where joblessness was acute and vocational training scarce. Rural land grants proposed by Interior Secretary Franklin Lane in 1919 proved impracticable in any case, since most arable public land had already been given away. Meanwhile, labor and political strife were rampant—revolution in Russia, chaos in Germany, a general strike in Seattle, a race riot in Chicago, and indices of class and racial turmoil elsewhere in the United States.

Under such circumstances, the American Legion (founded at Paris in 1919) came out immediately against “Bolshevism” and other radicalism, which it defined broadly to include everyone from the Communist Party to the League of Women Voters. Legion members helped break strikes of Kansas coal miners and Boston police in the summer of 1919, and from the 1920s through the 1950s made a war on “reds” one of their main activities. Legionnaires helped bring a House Un‐American Activities Committee into existence in 1938 and aided FBI probes of subversion thereafter. The interwar Legion was strongest in smaller cities and among prosperous members of the middle class. Like the GAR, it left racial matters largely to localities, which in practice usually meant segregated posts.

The War Risk Act of 1917 was intended to avoid the expense and abuses of the Civil War pension system by allowing World War I soldiers to pay small premiums in return for life insurance and future medical care. Ad ‐min istration of the act was inefficient, however, and veterans' hospitals proved too few in number and unable to cope with late‐developing disabilities and shell shock. The first vocational training and rehabilitation programs for veterans, established in 1917, similarly suffered from underfunding, poor teaching, and the tendency of veterans to treat “training” grants as pensions. Veteran protests brought about the consolidation of medical and educational programs in the Veterans Bureau (1921), which in 1930 became the Veterans Administration (VA). It was not until Frank Hines replaced the corrupt Charles Forbes in 1923, however, that the bureau began to function effectively.

World War I veterans never received service pensions and were eligible for nonservice‐related disability pensions only briefly, from 1930 to 1933. Instead, attention focused on “adjusted compensation,” a bonus approved by Congress in 1924 and payable in 1945, designed to make up for wartime inflation and lost earnings. Veterans were seriously divided on the propriety of the bonus, even after depression hardships drove 20,000 of them to march on Washington in 1932 as a “Bonus Army” demanding its immediate payment. Although troops led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur violently expelled the veterans from the city, the bonus was finally paid in 1936.

The rise of a general social welfare system under the New Deal decreased the need for military pensions and made aid to ex‐soldiers seem less like “special benefits.” Thus, when the 12 million veterans of World War II returned home, debate was minimal over the largest package of veterans' benefits in American history. The G.I. Bill (1944), drafted by former Legion commander Harry Colmery, provided World War II veterans with free college education and medical care, unemployment insurance for one year, and guaranteed loans up to $4,000 to buy homes or businesses. Other legislation guaranteed farmers loans on crops, reinstituted vocational training, and tried to safeguard the jobs of returning employees. By the 1970s, VA spending was greater than all but three cabinet departments (it achieved cabinet status in 1989). By 1980, benefits distributed under the G.I. Bill totaled $120 billion, an enormous investment in “social capital” and social mobility.

Unlike previous wars, World War II was fought mostly by conscripts, which may have made taxpayers more willing to compensate them for “forced labor.” These veterans were slightly younger and better educated than World War I veterans; they were mustered out into considerably less class and racial strife than the veterans of 1919. Still, they joined older veterans' groups rather than forming significant new ones: American Legion membership, which had fluctuated between 600,000 and 1 million before 1941, reached a record 3.5 million in 1946, while VFW membership rose from 300,000 to 2 million. Among liberal alternative groups founded in 1945, only AMVETS reached 250,000 members.

The Korean and Vietnam conflicts produced none of the triumphalism that followed World War II. Although the VA continued to grow—its 1995 budget was $37.4 billion, more than half of it earmarked for benefits—the Legion and VFW struggled throughout the 1960s and 1970s to attract new veterans. After the Vietnam War, which the older organizations supported fiercely, young veterans felt alienated from a society that often ignored or pitied them. In 1967, they formed the first significant antiwar veterans' group, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW; after 1983, the Vietnam Veterans of America, VVOA). With less than 20,000 members, the VVAW publicized war atrocities and lobbied for American withdrawal. In the 1980s, more Vietnam veterans began to join the Legion and VFW, bringing those groups up to their 1995 memberships of approximately 3 million and 2 million, respectively. Yet the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, dedicated at Washington in 1982, remains starkly noncelebratory: a sunken black granite wall listing names of the dead.

More recent health problems of Persian Gulf War veterans have highlighted the special needs of servicemen and women.
[See also Battlefields, Encampments, and Forts as Public Sites; Memorials, War; Newburgh “Conspiracy.”]

Bibliography

William Glasson , Federal Military Pensions in the United States, 1918.
Dixon Wecter , When Johnny Comes Marching Home, 1944.
Mary R. Dearing , Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R., 1952.
Wallace Davies , Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans' and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900, 1955.
Paul Starr , The Discarded Army: Soldiers After Vietnam, 1973.
Peter Karsten , Soldiers and Society: The Effects of Military Service and War on American Life, 1978.
William Pencak , For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941, 1989.
Stuart McConnell , Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1866–1900, 1992.
Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992.
R. B. Rosenberg , Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers' Homes in the New South, 1993.
Laura S. Jensen , The Early American Origins of Entitlements, Studies in American Political Development, 10 (1996).
Eric T. Dean, Jr. , Shook Over Hell: Post‐traumatic Stress, Vietnam and the Civil War, 1997.

Stuart McConnell

Veterans: Revolutionary War Because inadequate records were kept, the exact number of Americans who fought in the Continental army and in state militia units during the Revolutionary War (1775–83) is unknown. Most former members of the Continental army officer corps became ardent nationalists as a result of their military service and pressed to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new constitution. President George Washington placed a number of his former Continental army officers in executive positions in the new federal government.

Continental officers created the Society of the Cincinnati for themselves, but no national veterans' organizations emerged for the common soldiers. Many veterans of the Revolution continued to serve in the militia after 1783, and for numerous Americans the militia embodied the republican ideals of the citizen‐soldier. The heightened nationalism that emerged after the War of 1812 helped turn the aging and shrinking ranks of Revolutionary War veterans into symbols of civic virtue in the eyes of politicians and the public. In communities across the country, these gray‐haired ex‐soldiers often received honored places at the head of Fourth of July parades and other rituals honoring the Revolution and the Republic.

In 1818, responding to the public's growing esteem for the Revolutionary veteran, the U.S. Congress for the first time offered pensions to any veteran of the Continental army who had demonstrated financial need and had served for at least nine months. This differed from previous pensions offered only to officers and also to those soldiers permanently injured in battle. In 1832, Congress further liberalized these requirements and granted pensions to all living veterans, including militia members, regardless of financial need, if they had served for six months. This pension system set important precedents for the relationship of the veteran and the federal government. Subsequently, after every major war, veterans often received pensions and other benefits by virtue of their wartime service.
[See also Revolutionary War: Postwar Impact; Revolutionary War: Changing Interpretations.]

Bibliography

John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence, 1980.
John P. Resch, Politics and Public Culture: The Revolutionary War Pension Act of 1818, Journal of the Early Republic, 8 (Summer 1988), pp. 139–58.

G. Kurt Piehler

Veterans: Civil War The Civil War produced more than 2 million veterans of both armies; as late as 1890, the federal census found 1,034,073 surviving Union ex‐soldiers and 432,020 former Confederates. At the war's close, both groups faced dim employment prospects, civilian indifference, and the lingering effects of wounds and disease—13.9 percent of Union veterans and probably 20 percent of ex‐Confederates suffered from wounds alone. Union veterans in 1866 organized the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), which grew to more 400,000 members by 1890 and became probably the most powerful political lobby of the Gilded Age. Smaller groups included the Union Veteran Legion, the Veterans Rights Union (VRU), and the officers‐only Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS). Union veteran political pressure helped bring about the Arrears Act of 1879, which doubled pension expenditures in less than two years, and the Dependent Pension Act of 1890, which created a service pension system in all but name. The number of Union pensioners (including widows) reached a peak of 969,711 in 1901. In 1874, Congress mandated preference for disabled veterans in federal hiring, and New York and Kansas enacted general veteran preference laws; twelve new state soldiers' homes opened between 1879 and 1888. Federal largess to veterans, which represented the United States's first foray into social welfare spending, drew the fire of genteel reformers such as E. L. Godkin in the 1890s.

Confederate veterans organized much later. The largest Confederate veterans' group, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), was founded in 1889, and had an estimated 80,000 members by 1903; before 1885, the more exclusive Association of the Army of Northern Virginia (AANV) predominated. Ex‐Confederates were ineligible for federal pensions and hiring preferences, though individual southern states erected sixteen soldiers' homes to care for the wounded and indigent, and some provided modest pensions. Much of Confederate veteran culture, especially after 1890, was tied to a developing Lost Cause mythology that helped southerners cope with defeat while reintegrating themselves within the nation.

The attitudes of Civil War veterans toward each other, and toward noncombatants, were exceedingly complex. Wartime hatreds never really disappeared, as suggested by Grover Cleveland's hasty retraction, under GAR pressure, of an 1887 order to return captured Confederate battle flags to the South, or by ex‐Confederate veneration of Jefferson Davis and his daughter Varina Anne Davis on their tour of the South in 1886. Union and Confederate veterans also skirmished throughout the 1890s over the proper telling of Civil War history in school textbooks. But veterans of both sides also were prone to idealize each other at the expense of “civilians.” Between 1884 and 1887, the Century's widely read “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” avoided politics and balanced northern and southern viewpoints, while local Blue‐Gray reunions beginning in the 1880s culminated in a gigantic fiftieth anniversary reunion at Gettysburg in 1913. In their memoirs, veterans from both sides tended to emphasize Union, states' rights, and personal heroism and to downplay slavery and race.
[See also Civil War: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

Gaines M. Foster , Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1987.
Stuart McConnell , Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1866–1900, 1992.

Stuart McConnell

Veterans: World War I There were approximately 4.5 million veterans of the eighteen‐month U.S. participation in World War I. The average had served twelve months. About half went overseas for an average of 5.5 months. Some 1.1 million actually saw combat; of these, 204,000 were wounded or otherwise disabled. Veterans were simply mustered out of service from their bases in the United States. The government was unprepared to deal with the problems faced by returning veterans, especially unemployed or disabled veterans. A brief postwar recession in which unemployment reached 16 percent ended by 1921, the year in which the Veterans Bureau (forerunner of the Veterans Administration) was created. A system of veterans' hospitals was established that provided long‐term care especially for war‐related wounds and illnesses, tuberculosis caused by poison gas, and mental illness caused by “shell shock.”

Throughout the 1920s, veterans' benefits averaged $650 million per year, about 20 percent of the federal budget. In 1924, Congress, under pressure, acknowledged that the dollar per day enlisted men received had been outpaced by wartime inflation and voted World War I veterans an “adjusted compensation” (“the Bonus”), to be paid in 1945. During the Great Depression, unemployed veterans, calling themselves the “forgotten men,” demanded immediate payment of the bonus. Congress agreed, but President Herbert C. Hoover vetoed it. When many “Bonus Army” marchers remained camped in Washington, D.C., U.S. Army troops under Gen. Douglas MacArthur used tanks and tear gas to clear the capital of the protestors.

In the 1936 election year, the bonus was paid ahead of schedule at a cost of $3.9 billion of a total federal budget of $8.4 billion. In addition to the “Bonus,” hospitals, and disability benefits, World War I veterans also received civil service preference at all levels of government. Between one‐fifth and one‐third of surviving veterans belonged to the American Legion, formed by World War I veterans in 1919. Having served briefly and gloriously in the Great War, most veterans valued their experience in uniform for comradeship and travel, especially as three‐quarters of the veterans had never seen combat.
[See also Veterans of Foreign Wars.]

Bibliography

William P. Dillingham , Federal Aid to Veterans, 1917–1941, 1952.
William Pencak , For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941, 1989.

William Pencak

Veterans: World War II Over 16 million American men and women served in World War II, and their return home had a profound impact on them and on society. The sudden end of the war in September 1945 complicated demobilization. A shortage of transports as well as the need to maintain occupation forces in Japan and Germany meant long delays in bringing some troops home, especially from the Pacific theater. G.I.s staged demonstrations in Manila, Calcutta, Paris, and several other cities, demanding an immediate return. They were supported by their families. As portrayed in films like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), once they returned to the United States, they sought in various ways to resume their civilian lives and put the war behind them.

Despite the fears expressed by some social commentators about the destructive influences of war on combatants, the reintegration of veterans into American society produced neither economic upheaval nor a dangerous new class of men unable to accept the norms of civilian life. Returning G.I.s and their families faced a severe shortage of housing; consumer goods also remained in short supply in 1946 and 1947. The generous adjustment allowances provided by the G.I. Bill smoothed the transition of many ex‐servicemen and ‐women into civilian life. Military service did take a significant emotional toll on a number of former servicepeople, especially those who had been in combat. There were also many disabled veterans. But the majority of veterans returned successfully to a society that vindicated their efforts on behalf of the “Good War.” In turn, many returning veterans expressed the strong desire to “get on with their lives,” and after V‐J Day both marriage and birth rates soared as scores of former servicepeople started families.

As a political force, the impact of the World War II veterans on American politics remained important, if often elusive. Their numbers as a potential voting bloc helped explain why politicians showered such an array of benefits, including property tax breaks, educational benefits, and preferences of public employment. Every U.S. president from 1953 to 1992 had served in World War II, and veterans of this conflict also made up a significant portion of both houses of Congress in the period.

The American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans attracted a significant share of eligible former servicemen and women. Efforts on the part of some liberal left veterans to create a new mass‐based veterans' organization, the American Veterans Committee (AVC), failed. Tarred by critics for being a Communist front organization, the AVC won the allegiance of only a small fraction of veterans. Even after the “Good War,” the majority of veterans never joined any established veterans' organization. Furthermore, in contrast to veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and later the Vietnam War, the World War II veterans expressed little interest in sponsoring or lobbying for either local or national monuments marking their service, at least until the fiftieth anniversary of the war in the 1990s, when many of its veterans were already passing from the scene.
[See also Memorials, War; World War II: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

Davis R. B. Ross , Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans During World War II, 1969.
Richard Severo and and Lewis Milford , The Wages of War: When America's Soldiers Came Home—From Valley Forge to Vietnam, 1989.

G. Kurt Piehler

Veterans: Korean War Over 6 million Americans served in the armed forces during the era of the Korean War (1950–53), but they represented a smaller cohort demographically than their counterparts in World War II and they failed to garner the same public attention and acclaim. An unpopular war with limited mobilization, the Korean conflict ended in a stalemate instead of total victory. In 1952, the U.S. Congress enacted a Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act providing Korean veterans with educational benefits similar to but less than those offered World War II veterans under the G.I. Bill.

Further tarnishing the image, a handful of American servicemen captured by the enemy renounced their U.S. citizenship and a small number of American prisoners of war who participated in anti‐U.S. propaganda were put on trial by the U.S. government after their exchange for collaborating with the enemy. Some political commentators voiced concerns that captured American soldiers had been “brainwashed” by their Communist captors and now posed a threat of internal infiltration. This theme would be reflected in a controversial 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate.

By the 1970s, the Korean War became “the forgotten war,” but during the 1980s restored pride in the armed forces and the dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) sparked renewed interest among Korean War veterans and political leaders to build a similar national monument honoring those who served in Korea. Authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1986, built with private funds by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the Korean War Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. in 1995.
[See also Memorials, War; Veterans Administration.]

Bibliography

Richard Severo and and Lewis Milford , The Wages of War: When America's Soldiers Came Home—From Valley Forge to Vietnam, 1989.
Charles S. Young , Missing Action: POW Films, Brainwashing and the Korean War, 1954–1968, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 18 (1998), pp. 49–74.

G. Kurt Piehler

Veterans: Vietnam War The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) define the 9,656,000 men and 178,000 women who served on active duty in the armed forces between August 1964 and May 1975 as Vietnam‐era veterans. Of these, 2,586,152 men and 7,848 women served in the war in Vietnam.

Public attitudes toward veterans of the Vietnam War shifted from respect in 1965–67 to disdain following an antiwar movement that developed in 1968–70. Veterans and their problems became an embarrassment to the voters and the government as reminders of a war that had lost much popular support. The press highlighted veterans who engaged in violent crime, though they were not significantly overrepresented in crime, drinking, or drug use compared to nonveterans in their age cohort. In the early 1980s, popular sentiment began to change again. The dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 1982 marked the beginning of a national commitment to honoring veterans of the war.

Veterans who served in Vietnam faced unique biological and psychological problems. The most serious and widespread biological matter was exposure to dioxin in Agent Orange, a defoliant sprayed by aircraft. The effects of dioxin poisoning, which appeared several months after exposure, included chloracne (skin lesions), peripheral neuropathy (loss of feeling in the extremities), hepatic dysfunction (liver failure), non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma and soft tissue sarcomas (cancers), and porphyrinuria and hypertriglyceridemia (metabolic disorders). None of these conditions was amenable to cure; treatment could only alleviate symptoms.

Approximately 30 percent of veterans of the war suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Symptoms appeared gradually, and could include recurrent intrusive dreams and memories, feelings of estrangement from others, flat affect, survival guilt, impaired memory and concentration, exaggerated startle response, and sleep disorders. Veterans experienced higher than expected mortality rates from motor vehicle wrecks, suicide, homicide, and drug‐related medical conditions. PTSD resulted principally from the abrupt rupture of powerful emotional relationships when servicemembers left their comrades in the war zone, the lack of opportunity to process traumatic events with those who had shared them, and hostile or indifferent responses to veterans and their experiences by civilians back home. PTSD was most common among the psychologically vulnerable.

Vietnam veterans made up small minorities (24–28 percent) within the memberships of the existing veterans' organizations. The Veterans of Foreign Wars opposed measures that would benefit Vietnam veterans if those programs competed for dollars with programs to improve benefits for veterans of earlier wars. The American Legion was passive until 1982 with respect to programs for Vietnam veterans. The Disabled American Veterans, the most active advocate of Vietnam veterans' needs, took positive action to support veterans' mental health with storefront clinics.

The Veterans' Education and Training Amendments Act of 1970 (PL 91‐219) was the first of a series of acts to enhance educational benefits for Vietnam‐era veterans. Others include Public Laws 92‐540, 93‐508, 94‐502, and 95‐202. In 1979, 740,000 veterans were enrolled in education or vocational training under these programs. PL 93‐508 also required federal contractors to take affirmative action to hire disabled and Vietnam‐era veterans. Health benefits lagged until popular feelings toward veterans became more favorable in the 1980s. The DoD and DVA were slow to recognize dioxin poisoning and PTSD as service‐connected.

A measure to provide readjustment counseling to victims of PTSD was held up for several years in the House Veterans' Affairs Committee before it was enacted in 1979 (PL 96‐22). In 1981, the Congress gave the Veterans Administration discretionary authority to treat victims of dioxin poisoning, and in 1984, PL 98‐542 established standards for compensation. Not until 1991 was a presumption of service connection established for chloracne, non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma, and soft tissue sarcomas (PL 102‐4). In 1993, DVA established a presumptive service connection for porphyria, Hodgkin's disease, and other cancers.
[See also Toxic Agents: Agent Orange Exposure; Vietnam War.]

Bibliography

David E. Bonier,, Steven M. Champlin,, and and Timothy S. Kolly , The Vietnam Veteran: A History of Neglect, 1984.
Joel Osler Brende and and Erwin Randolph Person , Vietnam Veterans: The Road to Recovery, 1985.
Ghislaine Boulanger and and Charles Kadushin , The Vietnam Veteran Redefined, 1986.

Faris R. Kirkland