Veterans Day 2024

I hope all the veterans out there enjoyed their day yesterday! Each year I’ve blogged on Veterans Day, sharing my reflections on the Veteran experience in this great country of ours. I am generally overall pleased with my own Veteran experience. I feel recognized and adequately cared for as a veteran. I know many other Veterans share the same positive outlook.

I am not just talking about VA benefits, some of which I’ve covered over the last two weeks. I am also talking about our communities and how they interact with Veterans. I suppose like most things in life, it’s a matter of perspective. While I am fortunate to live in a town with an awesome VA clinic and a veteran positive community, I understand it may not be like this nationwide.

Why take care of veterans? Well, there is the obvious; veterans have performed the job no one really, deep down wants. Usually, military service involves residing far away from friends and family as well as a fair measure of personal danger. It is a physically and mentally demanding job and most veterans come out with at least some service-connected issues.

However, I think in America our need for robust veterans’ benefits and supportive communities goes beyond the obvious stated above. I believe that our nations priority on veterans is an extension of the United States national defense strategy of maintaining an all-volunteer military. I just can’t stress enough how an all-volunteer military is unique from many of our friends and allies in the world. I would go so far to say our volunteer force is uniquely American.

How would Veterans benefits and community perspectives on service be shaped if there was compulsory military service again as there was pre-1977? I’ve heard of poor veteran support from experiences shared by my Vietnam era friends. With high confidence I can say their generation, a conscripted military generation, was treated entirely different than the post 9/11 generation of veterans.

It’s almost a little shocking. Not only did our Vietnam era vets suffer a disillusioned and sometimes downright hostile society when they returned from service, the VA handled their care completely different than now; most would agree very poorly.

At least society and our government seemed to have figured it out and got it right for the next generation of veterans. But what if tomorrow we had to go back to a compulsory rather than a volunteer military? Would the current level of benefits be sustainable? Would our communities still rally around veterans if their numbers suddenly increased two or three times?

Hopefully, we’ll never find out. The volunteer force and their post military care is one thing our nation gets generally right. For now, I’ll enjoy my solid VA care and freebies out on the town with the quiet hope and prayer it will last for generations of veterans to come.

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