Veteran Entitlement

As the war came to an end and the one-time soldiers began to go home and back to their pre-war lives, one thing was for certain. For the ones that served and sacrificed there was a bond like no other. It was given to them by living through something that no one else could and through this, a sense of triumph was given to them. They saw themselves as lucky and proud to have served for their country and for some, wanted the world to know this. This feeling of entitlement was given to them through this sacrifice and the public responded in kind. But, looking deeper, where did this entitlement come from?

In an article by Martin Crotty and Mark Edele called  Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege, they look at this through the eyes of two Allied armies after the war, the Australians and the USSR. They come up to the conclusion that veterans in themselves are not a “social entity” and are not “the exclusive product of postwar discourse and the postwar political, cultural and social milieux in the countries for which soldiers fought.” Instead, they are really a social group with the same experiences of being soldiers in a time of massive war. Basically, what this says is that the group known as Veterans is not a group held together by ideas or cultural tendencies, but by a common experience over a long period of time. I agree with this idea. When forced to serve with people, to live with them, fight with them and die with them, it forces a bond that can never be broken and that could never be explained to others.

However, this thought process would lead to a sense of entitlement for soldiers who were returning home. Soldiers who were forced to leave their homes to defend the country believed that the country owed them for their sacrifices. In Stephen Garton’s Australian case, he states, “a belief that returned men had special citizenship status, which exempted them from demands for further sacrifice for the national good; it was the turn of other (implicitly lesser) citizens to bear the brunt of hardship” for the nation. These veterans believed them and their families had sacrificed enough in the war and wanted the rest of the country to do the same. Russian veterans thought the same: “The time will come”, wrote the Tsarskoe Selo Garrison Soldiers’ Committee on 25 March 1917, “when […] the gray hero will return to his native villages, settlements, and towns, and he will present a bill, a long bill, written in the blood of millions of his brothers, and the workers in the rear will have to pay that bill.” With these ideas, soldiers felt entitled to rights that they deserved as fathers and defenders of the country. But to even become a group that could do this, soldiers had to meet certain variables to get their benefits. Martin Crotty and Mark Edele suggest that if a veteran group wanted to get its benefits it had to get the country on its side.  To do this, veterans had to have these variables: “(1) the perceived moral debt owed by the rest of society to its former soldiers; (2) the conscript or volunteer status of the soldiers; (3) the relativity between soldiers’ and non-soldiers’ service and sacrifice for the war effort; (4) the existence, efficiency and unity of the veterans’ movements; (5) the democratic or non-democratic nature of the government; (6) the state’s fear of its veterans and its ability to suppress veterans’ violence; (7) the state’s ability to meet the economic and financial demands of its veterans; and (8) the existence or non-existence of a welfare state.” Once these conditions were made, veterans and their organizations would have massive pull with their governments, making it easier to receive benefits faster than any other groups.

While today, we do not question this idea of helping our soldiers who come back from war. We see them as heroes who deserve everything that we as a society gives them. We have to understand that this thought of giving is a deeper obligation that we have agreed to when letting these soldiers go to war. We owe them. Just think if you received the same treatment, to be forced to a war or to defend our homes and how we believe society should give back. My biggest takeaway is that this sense of entitlement, even though in some cases this could be bad, meant that these veterans and their families received what they deserved, but we should still give them more for the sacrifices they endured. This goes for all veterans, past, present, and future. But we should also never forget the people left behide who also helped with the war in thier own, however it is the men and the women in harms way that derseve the most respect.