After decade of war, troops still struggling to find work

Washington Post ^ | 19 Mar 13 | Greg Jaffe,

[SkyPilot]

This is what the end of a decade of war looked like in Oklahoma a few weeks ago: ex-soldiers in cheap new business suits; human resources managers with salesman smiles and stacks of glossy fliers; a former Marine speaking to a television news crew about the

[ansel12]

Lots of Viet Nam Veterans came home to find few jobs and a hostile population that would not give a vet a job. Carter had wrecked the economy with his voodoo economics. Gas prices were rising daily and gas shortages were common. Few vets wanted to work for the Government but with veterans preference we swallowed our pride and worked for the evil empire.

They weren't coming home from Vietnam in the 1990s or even in 1977 and 1979.

Why isn't the recession of 1973 to 1975 the most relevant to your post?

[mountainlion]

Why isn’t the recession of 1973 to 1975 the most relevant to your post?

I don’t know. Probably going to school then and looking for a job after 79. For all I can remember I may have been drunk.

[henkster]

Carter killed the auto industry too, but some of that was self-inflicted, some of that was the result of bad Nixon-Ford policies. But I remember the Carter malaise quite well.

I commuted from Indy to Kokomo every day in the summer of 1980 to work a commercial construction job. We were the only construction job in Kokomo that summer. Every day, laid off auto workers would come by looking for any type of work and got turned away. The local electricians on the job worked as slow as they could; they knew when that job was done, there wasn’t another one waiting.

The locals didn’t care much for us Indy folk being there taking jobs they thought they should have.

[Terry Mross]

Viet Nam was over before Carter became president. Veterans were having a hard time getting jobs but it was before Carter. I don’t think Ford’s W.I.N. buttons were helping. And it did get much worse after Carter took over. Boy, was it tough!

[Smokin' Joe]

I don’t think Ford’s W.I.N. buttons were helping. People where I lived were turning them upside down and saying Not In My time...

[Terry Mross]

I heard it called “No Immediate Miracle”. Ford also had stickers stuck on federal building walls, including colleges, right next to thermostats advising what tempature to set the thing. I think it was 70 in the winter and 80 in the summer. Someone figured out it was going to cost a lot more to remove the stickers from the walls than they could save in 20 years on utility bills.

There have been some very smart men who served in the white house. Ford wasn’t one of them. And he was followed by another one.

[Smokin' Joe]

I think Ford was supposed to hold the office until Rockefeller could get situated, then resign. (I also think Betty jacked him up over that, and told him to stay put). Then Rockefeller seized up (I heard three different activity/place/other person versions of that on the radio before they settled on the story). and those plans went out the window, for whoever made them.

Otherwise, we'd have had the current mess a decade or two earlier.