What is the genealogy of "veteran-ness?" (A multi-part thread)
What (if anything) is a democratic society's obligation to its veterans in the 21st century? One thing I'd be interested in seeing is a kind of historical tracing of what veteran status has meant over time.
What (if anything) is a democratic society's obligation to its veterans in the 21st century? One thing I'd be interested in seeing is a kind of historical tracing of what veteran status has meant over time.
My sense is that there is an over-expectation of recognition and status that is a by-product of the "support the troops" mania of the early GWOT, where the Bush administration essentially used "troop support" as a stalking horse for political legitimacy.
If one didn't endorse Bush policies, then one didn't "support the troops," and questioning Bush's policies was rendered (at least among ideologues and partisans) as a Dolchstoß to The Troops in partisan discourses.
But more broadly, we seem today to have an expectation of a kind of Troop Awareness that's historically unusual. My sense from consuming 20th century and earlier fiction, movies, etc., is that veteran status was hardly noteworthy at all other than on particular anniversaries.
In the famous "band of brothers" speech in Act IV of Shakespeare's "Henry V," a man who survives Agincourt will "on the vigil feast his neighbors" and "show his scars" and "rouse him at the name of Crispian." But we infer that on all other days he is an ordinary fellow.
When military service was an expectation of citizenship - as far back as Rome - to have been an ordinary soldier would have been ... well, ordinary, occasioning no special recognition from one's fellow citizens.
Being a famous general would have been different, of course, meriting a suitably martial statue in remembrance, but to me this falls more in the domain of the construction of civic notables than it does commemoration of "veteran" status.
And that gets to the crux of the matter. It seems to me that "veteran" has long been a title associated with ordinary soldiers - conscripts, if you will - and not famous generals or admirals. Jack Tar was a veteran; Lord Nelson was, well, a Lord.
In the USA, my guess would be that the nature of "veteran-ness" changed witn the founding of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1866, something that happened in the same era as the founding of the American Medical and Bar Associations, The Grange, and other "professional" lobbies.
As Theda Skocpol showed, the post-Civil War era was also when veteran benefits became a political issue. The GAR essentially posited that the ordinary Union soldier should be viewed not as "ordinary" but as a savior of the Republic and therefore entitled to a privileged place.
That notion of veteran privilege disappeared for veterans of the Spanish-American War because that brief war was not fought by conscripts. It was a professional and volunteer war, so there was no expectation of societal privilege attendant to it.
Contrast that to the world wars, where after WWI veteran privilege was contested politically (i.e., the Bonus Army) but after WWII was essentially taken for granted - unsurprising, given the scale of the conflict and the societal demands it imposed.
And of course the post-WWII veteran privilege provided a contrasting point of reference for the treatment of Korean and Vietnam War veterans.
Those vets - especially those from Vietnam - were said to have not been given their appropriate status in society, even though that privileged status was a fairly recent (and thoroughly political) construction.
But therein lies the rub. One could argue that Vietnam veterans deserved privilege because they were (largely) conscripts. Society placed upon them a demand it did not place on others, so there was, in effect, a moral debt to be repaid in status for the ordinary soldier.
But that's clearly *not* the case today. Our contemporary obsessiveness with veteran status is a function of its comparative *lack* of ordinariness. With no conscription, there is no societal expectation of service. Service is a *choice,* like being a cop or firefighter.
Like the Spanish-American War, today's wars are fought by professionals. I have #PME students who will sometimes claim privilege because they "volunteered." I don't know which Army they were in, but I got *paid* in mine. It was a *job* - one I sought, not one I was made to do.
Ontologically, "veteran" is different today than it was in the distant past. It has been politicized in ways the GAR might have approved of, but which are not necessarily healthy for society. It's as if giving one's service is no longer enough: there has to be a payoff...
...and salary, in-service, and post-service benefits appear, for whatever reason, to be insufficient. There seems to be an additional expectation of constant recognition if not outright deference that is bad for civil-military relations.
So we see the veteran car stickers and veteran license plates and veteran ball caps and hear the mandatory invocations of "support the troops" and "will the veterans stand to be recognized," and one really has to wonder what the intent there is.
It's as if people are reaching for something "unifying" in an era of political polarization. We can all agree, it goes, that it's important to "support the troops."
But what that implies about the nature and meaning of service is intensely problematic, and from my perspective it constructs an expectation of privilege that is corrosive to civil-military relations, and that fundamentally transforms the social significance of military service.
It also forces us to ask whether a veteran professional soldier is "the same" as a veteran conscript, the former having chosen to pick up a rifle and the latter having been forced by society - often against his will - to do so.
This is a perfect example of how the meaning of "service" has been twisted (and commercialized and trivialized): it's army-colored! with "authentic" G.I.-style stencil text! how patriotic! 
What it really does is signify how voluntary military service, of however short a duration, has been transformed into a debt, a marker, that society is somehow expected to pay off in perpetuity -- and one that no other undertaking similarly deserves.
And finally, I don't think we can underestimate the importance of professional veteran lobbying groups - particularly the American Legion - in having contributed both the construction of the Professional Veteran Identity and to its partisan weaponization.
So the creation of the VA, the WWI Bonus, the WWII G.I. Bill - in terms of #CMR these are examples of society (thru the agency of the State) acknowledging a debt to a minority of ordinary citizens upon whom an extraordinary social demand had involuntarily been placed: war service
But in peacetime, the only payoff the military could expect was its comparative autonomy and self-governing separateness from society, as illustrated in the pre-Pearl Harbor portions of James Jones' "From Here to Eternity." There was no G.I. Bill for peacetime soldiering.
So "veteran-ness" as a marker of social identity has always been a function of that separate, extraordinary, and *involuntary* status. But with a professional volunteer army, the relationship of the former soldier to society is fundamentally different...
...even given wartime service. So the notion that veteran's status confers privilege, both in terms of #CivilMilitaryRelations specifically and of societal obligations more generally is, from my perspective, deeply problematic.
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