Second-Class Vets Get the Call

Another Veterans Day has passed, and it's once again time to thank those who so generously thanked me for my service. And once again, it's time to point out that in the United States not all veterans are created equal.

Thank you, Applebees, for a delicious dinner. The place was packed with veterans. This year, the brewers of Sam Adams provided a free beer with my complimentary meal. Thanks, Sam.

We wanted to replenish our dog and bird feed supplies and pick up several hardware items. Our local Tractor Supply store was the place to go, and they gave a 15 percent discount to vets. Thanks, Tractor guys.

A surprise gift showed up the day after Veterans Day. We went shopping for several exotic holiday gift items at World Market. At the checkout stand was a sign offering vets a 25 percent discount throughout the weekend. Thanks, World Market.

My local newspaper marked the day with a feature story about Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in the area recruiting honor guard members. The honor guards traditionally present a flag to the family of diseased vets and fire 21-gun rifle salutes at burial sites. Seems several posts can't come up with enough members who can shoulder a rifle to handle the duties, so they now seek members of the American Legion and even honorably discharged vets who are not members of the VFW or Legion to serve in honor guards.

 

They want us to help honor Legion vets who don't honor us.

I served two years in the U.S. Army, and was honorably discharged on May 19, 1960. I don't qualify for VFW membership because all my service was stateside and VFW members served overseas. I have no problem whatever with that.  However, I think it is reprehensible that many honorably discharged veterans are ineligible for American Legion membership.

Overseas service is not required by the American Legion. Members need only honorable service during seven "war eras," defined by arbitrary dates. Because my service dates don't fit into an "era," I am a second-class veteran not eligible for Legion membership, even though some of my less fortunate fellow soldiers were being dispatched to Viet Nam as "advisors" during my service time. Strangely, if I had served for just one day in the "era" that began nine months after my discharge, I would be welcomed as a Legionnaire.

Thousands, perhaps millions, who served honorably in the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force are with me in the ranks of second-class veterans.   

It seems the ultimate irony that we now are being invited to join honor guards to shoulder a rifle and fire a salute to fellow veterans whose largest organization bars us from membership. Perhaps those "patriots" in the U.S. Congress, some of whom never gave a day of military service to their country, could act to give second-class veterans first-class status. The American Legion operates under a Congressional charter.

Serving (Some) Veterans

Yesterday I received what has become an annual gift in recognition of my two years of honorable service in the U.S. Army. A few days earlier I received my annual insult from the American Legion.

The gift was a delicious free meal at Applebee’s. The place was packed with veterans and their families.  Every vet who entered was presented with a nifty little red, white, and blue lapel button. The air was filled with “thank you for your service” wishes courtesy of the restaurant staff. 

Veterans young and old were having a ball. Some wore caps identifying their service. Not surprisingly, a few brought along a little barracks humor. We overheard one old geezer greeting another with, “Tom, I didn’t know you were in World War II.”

“I sure was,” Tom said. “And I even was on our side.”

On Tuesday, a thick packet of information, including a dozen free address labels, arrived from American Legion headquarters. The package also had a temporary membership card, a “certificate of nomination,” and a personalized letter. The letter congratulated me for doing military duty and said if I “qualified” I could become a member of the organization and receive numerous services.

To “qualify” all I had to do was certify that one day of my two years in the Army fell within certain time periods dating back to April 6, 1917. I already knew there would be no fit.  My two years of active duty don’t count, because the U.S. theoretically was not at war. Some of the guys from my unit who were sent to Viet Nam as “advisors” probably would be amused, or perhaps enraged, to learn that.

Once again, the Legion had the audacity to remind thousands of us “peacetime soldiers” that we are considered second-class vets. (for some details about this outrage, click on “Upon Further Review” under Most Popular Posts in the right-hand column on this page.)

Applebee’s considers every honorably discharged veteran a first-class vet. They serve all of us on Veterans Day. May the restaurant chain grow and prosper.

May the American Legion leaders, who sign their letters “serving veterans,” march straight to . . . .

The Commander Salutes Some of Us

The national commander of the American Legion, Jimmie L. Foster, is:

a. An expert at flip-flopping.

b. A man with a very short memory.

Or,

c. A blatant liar.

Just in time for Veteran’s Day 2010, my local paper published a lengthy letter from Foster under the headline “American Legion Strives to Represent All Veterans.”

Headlines sometimes misrepresent stories they introduce; however, in the fifth paragraph of his letter, Foster said, “. . . from its inception, the Legion always has maintained that a veteran is a veteran.”

Bullshit!

As the Geezer pointed out last Veteran’s Day (11/12/09 and 11/16/09 Posts), the Legion denies membership to several million honorably discharged veterans because they did not serve during the Legion’s definitions of “wartime.” I am one of those. My two years of honorable service (1958-1960) in the U.S. Army don’t mean a thing to the American Legion. Neither would 20 years of service by a Marine whose enlistment ended on Dec. 6, 1941. How ridiculous is that?

Was I not exposed to danger when men in my unit were returning from service as “advisors” in Laos and Cambodia, even though officially we were not at war in Southeast Asia? I could have been sent just as they were. One sergeant in my unit gave a speech at a class I attended in which he described how he directed artillery fire onto the Chinese mainland. When’s the last time we were at war with China? Was my hypothetical pre-World War II vet never at risk during two decades of service in which he pledged to serve his country however and wherever he was ordered to do so?

Perhaps Foster just forgot the facts for a moment. Two paragraphs later, he said, “If you honorably served our country during wartime (emphasis added), you have a home in the Legion, period.”

Hum, he must suddenly have remembered the Legion’s membership rules. Or, more likely, he knew them all along and just tossed in the corrected definition because the thrust of his message was not to reconcile with veterans like me who the Legion sees as “second class,” but to try to recruit women and minority “wartime” vets, whom the Legion tended to ignore for many years.

Foster could spearhead a drive to correct the injustice of the irrelevant dates of service restrictions. Because the Legion is suffering significant membership declines, such an effort by the organization’s leader would have a high chance of success. Don’t count on him doing that. Many Legionnaires, some of whom served much of their active duty time in the Officer’s Club, are not eager to have their heroic images sullied by allowing any second-class vets into their club now.

Foster concluded his letter with the final insult to what the Legion perceives to be second-class veterans:

“On this Veterans Day, let us thank God for the gift of freedom made possible by those who served our nation with honor, courage, and commitment in our armed forces during all wars (my emphasis; he uses the Legion’s definitions here, no doubt, again ignoring the Cold War period) that enabled so many of them to earn that coveted title of an ‘American veteran.’”

How nice of him to imply that we “peacetime” vets are not veterans at all and did not serve with honor, courage, or commitment. Whatever Foster is, a., b., c. or something else, I will not salute him today. But I will salute ALL my fellow veterans, regardless of gender, color, or dates of service.


Thank you for your honorable service, my comrades.

Upon Further Review

The previous post dealing with “second-class veterans” generated a flurry of reaction, through e-mails and personal observations in addition to the direct comments. One reader questioned the assertion that the American Legion would exclude a two-year vet who was honorably discharged. She said this is so preposterous that I must be wrong.

I rechecked at www.legion.org. I was right. Had I served from June 25, 1950 through January 31, 1955 (Korea) I could join. Ditto for February 28, 1961 through May 7, 1975 (Vietnam). But my service from May 20, 1958 through May 19, 1960 doesn’t count. I would qualify, however, had I served for about five weeks starting December 20, 1989, when we attacked a mighty adversary . . . Panama!

American Legion membership runs in my family. Two of my uncles served overseas in World War I and became legionnaires. Another uncle was awarded a Croix de Guere medal by the French government for bravery in battle. He would have had no trouble joining the American Legion, but I don't know that he did.


My father was drafted in the last days of WWI, and was discharged while still in training in North Carolina. He was in the U.S. Army barely long enough to have his picture taken in uniform. That minimal and hardly dangerous service qualified Dad for American Legion membership. He joined and participated in activities of the local post for nearly 50 years.


We had other connections. I played American Legion baseball for two years, and one of my proudest possessions is a trophy given to me by the post in my hometown as the "Outstanding Senior--1953" in my high school class.

Strangely, although the Legion obviously doesn’t want me as a brother vet, I could participate in some of the organization’s activities. I qualify to sign on as one of the “Sons of the American Legion” because of Dad’s brief service back in 1918.

I’ll be damned if I’ll walk through that loophole!