How Vietnam veterans built the first Vet Centers
If you have ever sat in a Vet Center, you were sitting in something that exists because a previous generation of veterans refused to stop asking for it.
Miguel Santos served eight years in the Army with two deployments and left as a staff sergeant in 2017. He writes about veterans coming home, the VA, and the history that the people who lived it rarely talk about. He does most of his interviews on the phone, early in the morning.
If you have ever sat in a Vet Center, you were sitting in something that exists because a previous generation of veterans refused to stop asking for it.
The 1944 GI Bill is one of the most consequential pieces of American domestic legislation of the twentieth century. The version Korean War veterans got was noticeably less…
Every base I was on had one. A hole in the ground, sometimes the size of a football field, burning everything the base produced, with jet fuel used as an accelerant.
Ask most Americans to name the military operations of the last forty years and you will get Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan. Panama, December 1989, usually does not come up at…
The combat exclusion for women flying aircraft came down in 1993. The Gulf War in 1991 is a large part of why.
A quarter or so of veterans enrolled in VA health care live in rural areas, and the system was not built around them. It was built around cities with medical centres in them.