"Memorial Daze"

...on Decoration Day
Arthur S. Siegel, 1943
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

Charles Pierce—

We let them get on planes ahead of us, with the elderly and the infirm and the toddlers, but we underfund hospital care and live quite comfortably with the notion that a lot of the functions of the military have been privatized. (Are we that long from Honor The Contractors ceremonies?) We pay tribute to them at ballgames, but send them into battle ill-prepared, and bring them home to decrepit facilities and heedless bureaucracies. We give them parades, but had to be blackjacked into giving them a "new G.I. Bill" that is but a pale shadow of the original one, which did no less than create the modern American middle class. When I first started writing politics, there was an ongoing argument of what were then called "veterans preference" programs, a vestige once again of what was done for the returning World War II vets. The fight was over whether it would be extended to include the veterans then recently returned from Vietnam.

It is Vietnam that hangs thickly over our ostentatious public displays of affection for The Troops. It is a determination to Get It Right This Time. However, there is at the heart of it a fundamental misunderstanding of what we got wrong. The returning Vietnam veteran was treated abominably. But, in fact, if you want to find the people who did the Vietnam generation the most damage, don't look to the hippies. Look to the institutions staffed and run by what the Vietnam guys used to call, contemptuously, "the Class of '45," the people who ran the VA, and the VFW posts, The Greatest Generation, who looked down on them as losers and who stiffed them on their country's obligations. In actual fact, it was the remnants on the antiwar Left — the people who ran the G.I. coffeehouses and the like — who first took them seriously on issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and the lingering effects of Agent Orange. Those were the people who paid The Troops of that time the most basic tribute there is — taking their human problems seriously. The problem was not people shouting "babykiller" and those mythical expectorations that author Jerry Lembecke put paid to years ago. The problem was that the government abandoned them. The problem was that the community of other veterans abandoned them. And that went on for years. Ronald Reagan famously called their war "a noble cause" and then shut down all the out-patient psychiatric services that the VA finally put in place. What you did was noble, and now sleep on the sidewalk...

Predictably, there was to be little coverage of these veterans, just a few days ago—

Although clashes between police and demonstrators led the news from Chicago, the main act Sunday was the massive protest march which saw members of Iraq Veterans Against the War throwing their medals away in a symbolic gesture against the Global War on Terror. At the start of the march which preceded the ceremonies, we see the inordinate distance the police insisted on between photographers and the veterans.