Disabled veterans shatter the myths of american warfare

BY ANN JONES

It is the business of soldiers to be killed, and the job of civilians to be grateful for their human sacrifice, because that’s the way God wants it, or so we have been told by famous generals, patriotic politicians, war profiteers and public relations firms under contract to the Pentagon.

But American­ wars have produced masses of other, far more troublesome soldiers who instead came home with crippling physical and mental wounds. They are the subject of Paying With Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, a valuable history by John M. Kinder. His concern is not the multiple problems of individual disabled vets, but the capitalized Problem they collectively present to U.S. policymakers.

Kinder, a professor of American studies and history at Oklahoma State University, focuses his book on World War I and hopes to elevate disabled veterans to the center of our thinking about warfare — to “reshape the way Americans think about the nation’s history of war.” Consider this: when the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, it was still paying pensions to Union veterans of the Civil War that ended in 1865.

It stopped paying benefits to veterans of World War I only in 2007, in the midst of the post- 9/11 wars. And when wounded soldiers were shipped home from Afghanistan, VA hospitals were still filled with vets “rehabilitating” from the war in Vietnam. The overlap reveals an unacknowledged truth about American war: it is never over.

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