During and after Vietnam, veterans were treated poorly. I could feel the disdain of civilians at times in uniform in public at times during my enlistment. Now that our military is on the cutting edge of the Woke transformation of America and the world, we veterans are treated like Celebrities. Am I the only one that has the ominous feeling that this is a trap?
A Veteran is a soldier who is no longer active duty/reserve status. Not all Veterans went to war. Our military life was not in our own hands but subject to the whim of orders according to whatever Washington thought we needed to be doing. Please remember that everyone who served honorably is a Veteran:
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
In remembrance of my Commander Army LTC Daniel E. Holland, who got the orders to deploy while I remained with the unit.
As a vet, I would say that this article applies to some, but not all, vets.
Have a great Veterans Day to each and every veteran here in FR and all veterans everywhere...
JBW (U S Navy 1967-1973)
I’m so glad to see the pushback here re: veteran victim hood. While I am in no way minimizing the impact on many of our fellow servicemembers there is seldom, if any, mention of the positive lifelong impact veterans are known for in business circles. Veterans bring leadership, organizational and motivational skills and technical know-how to the table unlike Masters Degree holders fresh out of college. Veterans skills are skills learned first hand by doing them, not by reading about them. So today let’s be proud of who we are and what we did. Don’t let others define us or our sacrifices.
Decades ago Vietnam vets were shown to be better off than their non-vet age group measured by home ownership, intact marriages, education, etc, which made sense since vets are vetted and all meet certain basic standards in physical health, education, mental stability, and mental health while civilians run the full gamut, so it wasn’t surprising that the smaller vetted group was on average higher quality people.
For decades now the push has been to portray those who join the military as victims, a class of people who will never recover from what serving your country and being patriotic does to you, losers, broken and mentally ill, homeless losers, empty hulls of the suckers who believed in toxic masculinity, and being warriors for the old outdated idea of serving America in uniform.
Veterans made this country great, we used to number in the tens of millions, I remember posting veteran populations of 24 and 25 million on freerepublic, we played golf on the moon, built the most advanced country on earth and were its most dynamic, driven, and productive part of its population.
The fewer veterans become, the more sympathetically vicious the neurotic, feminized public opinion makers become in portraying them and their willingness to serve as negatives, as a sure road to a dark and troubled future trapped within their traumatized inner selves as victims of the flag and their outdated visions of American manhood.