Awful, though sadly too not that surprising. We do not do very well by our veterans, despite the rampant militarism among much of the far right. Back in the Vietnam era, and the decade afterwards, many people pointed to the contrast between the way the country treated WWII vets and the way it treated Vietnam vets. The common wisdom was that many of the difficulties Vietnam era veterans faced were rooted in the sense of abandonment or invisibility many felt when coming back to a civilian existence that at best ignored them and at worst met them with active hostility. But I think the situation is far worse today.
Back then, Vietnam was for maybe a decade front and center on people’s radars. It dominated the news many nights, and was at or near the center of much of the political and social unrest of the era. We’ve now had people in harm’s way in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years. We were actively involved in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 or thereabouts, with occasional involvement since then. Yet there is little to any ongoing coverage of these things, apart from the infrequent flare ups of events that were significant enough to major news outlets to motivate some coverage. Tens of thousands of men and women have cycled through these combat zones, thousands being injured or killed since 2001, yet the level of public awareness of what was going on was never very high. In the beginning, or when the invasion of Iraq kicked off in 2003, sure, but nothing like the nightly drumbeat of war news we had in the period from around 1966 to 1973.
Part of this of course is the 24-hour news cycle and the always-on Internet, which makes sustained focus on any one thing nearly impossible. Part though is the way the military, after Desert Storm, figured out how to pretty much banish actual news reporting from combat theaters. Unlike in Vietnam, where you had cameramen and reporters in the mud with the grunts, often covering stuff with little effective oversight from Saigon, nowadays we rarely get any real coverage of combat ops and none that isn’t massaged, managed, and carefully curated by the Pentagon.
So, yeah, service personnel today go abroad, serve in dangerous circumstances, and come home to a place where no one knows or cares about what they did, or understands why, though the latter is squarely on the shoulders of the government which, in my view, really doesn’t know what the hell it is doing over there. It’s almost as if people would be better off incurring anger and opposition from people back home, rather than utter indifference.
