Our Veterans

OUR VETERANS

Looking for a fantasy view of America's military? Probably no better place to start than the Super Bowl. This year's edition, for instance, featured a tribute to Pat Tillman who left behind a career with the Arizona Cardinals football team to enlist in the U.S. Army following the 9/11 attacks and was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan. What the tribute failed to mention, however, was that he was first deployed to Iraq, for a war that he called "f*cking illegal." Also unmentioned was that he was killed by "friendly fire," an inconvenient fact not acknowledged by the military for a month after his death, which fact his brother Kevin - who enlisted and served with him - described to Congress as a "deception" that "was an insult to the family, but more importantly, its primary purpose was to deceive a whole nation." But then if you had any question as to whether the National Football League's loyalty would lie with the Defense Department or the individual soldier, you might just ask the NFL veterans pressing the league to accept responsibility for its players' brain damage.

On the other hand, looking for a real life take on what life in America's military in the current 24/7/365-war era may bring? A good place to start might be Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven's book, "Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs," where inconvenient facts are not given short shrift. Starting with a thumbnail history of the nation's treatment of its veterans going all the way back to the American Revolution - mostly poor, they note, but significantly improving following the Second World War - they quickly bring us to today's 19 million vets who constitute 7 percent of the population - only half the 1990 level - with the largest group still dating from the Vietnam War era.

Readers surprised or appalled by the participation of the mercenary Wagner group in Russia's Ukraine invasion may also be surprised to learn that America's post-9/11combat zone deaths actually include more private military contractors (generally called mercenaries when they fight for foreign nations) than actual U.S. military personnel. They may also be appalled to learn that many of the other Americans who did the actual fighting in these wars lost their military health care benefits after deactivation because they were "only" in National Guard and Reserve units rather than regular military, our current all-volunteer army having proven inadequate to the task. Although there are only 200,000 or so of them left, the World War II "greatest generation" vets probably still dominate the public's impression of what post-military life is like, largely because they served in the last American war effort to enjoy near universal support. But as this book illustrates in so many ways, it's been quite different for the vets who have come since them.

One of the most profound differences the authors report is the fact that due to advances in medical care, the ratio of military who survived potentially fatal injuries in the Afghanistan/Iraq wars was more than five times higher than in any previous, resulting in the most disabled generation of vets in American history. Which brings us to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the focus of the lion's share of the book's attention. From 2006 to 2015, "the number of veterans requiring VA-provided mental health care rose from 900,000 annually to 1.6 million," which the authors attribute to "ongoing collateral damage from 'forever wars,'" whose ripples extend even beyond this group to the "44 percent of post-9/11 veterans [who] reported reintegration problems, as compared with only 25 percent of earlier veterans."

"Our Veterans" describes a VHA turnabout in health care starting around the time that the 1989 movie version of Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic's memoir Born on the Fourth of July hit the silver screens (remember movie theaters?), exposing the nation to the reality of "VHA facilities in shocking physical condition." The turnaround took considerable time, but by 2006 it had the by-no-means-radical Bloomberg Businessweek declaring that the VHA provided "the best medical care in the U.S." The authors describe it as "an island of socialized medicine," comparable to "the National Health Service in the UK ... an integrated national network of public hospitals and clinics." Legally empowered to negotiate prices, the VHA paid 54% less for prescription drugs than Medicare in 2017. (The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will allow for some negotiated Medicare prices starting in 2025.) Among the system's numerous outstanding attributes the authors note is that about "120,000 VHA employees" (out of 300,000) "are union members," and due to "collective bargaining rights, VHA management must pay more attention to the kinds of occupational hazards that are widespread in healthcare work, particularly in private-sector hospitals without unions." (Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio has filed legislation to repeal those rights.)

Of course, not everyone in the heavily private-sector-funded US Congress entirely approves of seeing public-sector institutions do a better job; after all, the example of well run, government administered health care could threaten the insurance and pharmaceutical industry campaign contribution streams. The authors detail a particularly excruciating 2010 example of government self-sabotage when the first Obama Administration Secretary of Veterans Affairs, retired four-star general Eric Shinseki, expanded VA medical coverage to three new health conditions presumptively tied to Agent Orange exposure. Supported by all the major veterans organizations, this expansion - as designed and expected - resulted in a major influx of new Vietnam-era veterans that was desirable, but unfunded. As the authors note, "While Congress, on a bipartisan basis, has traditionally backed ever-larger military budgets, federal spending on VBA (Veterans Benefits Administration) claim processing rarely keeps up with any postwar surge in new claims from recently damaged veterans as well as additional patients."

The delays caused by the new claims then became part of the Republican House Veterans Affairs Committee Chair's "broader narrative of government mismanagement and inefficiency under the Obama administration," which prompted the administration to direct all VHA appointments to be scheduled within fourteen days of request, "a goal that could not be met with available resources." In response, Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Bernie Sanders proposed appropriating the necessary funds, only to be blocked by Republican Senator (and famous Vietnam War veteran) John McCain, after which the Koch brothers-funded Concerned Veterans of America began to beat the drums for the need to privatize VA services. In all, a textbook example of the privatization drive of the past few decades: Say that government doesn't work and then make it so by underfunding it.

And we touch on only a few of the area covered: with 57 pages of footnotes, a 14 page index, a six page bibliography, and three pages devoted entirely to explaining the abbreviations used, the volume could fairly be called encyclopedic. Rest assured that if your interests run to active duty soldiers on food stamps, the lack of enlisted men and women among the ranks of the largely hawkish new veterans getting elected to Congress, the high rate of veteran opioid addiction, their exploitation by for-profit colleges, the burgeoning issue of sexual assault in the military, or post-9/11 veteran medical bills that are projected to rise to $2.5 trillion by 2050, you will find something on it here.