Things improve, for a while

When I entered the Navy in late 1999, the GI Bill seemed like a good deal.  Back then, $18,000 for college seemed like a great deal of money.  Surely, this must be enough to pay for even a very expensive school.  But I was merely 19, and naïve.  Even in 1999, $18,000 was a pitifully small sum for school.  Especially when considering books, living expenses and tuition.  It would never have been enough.

          I opted in to the Montgomery GI Bill program during my first month of service.  I initially thought about passing on the buy in, as Illinois pays tuition and books for veterans who complete six years of active duty service.  A Petty Officer Augustine convinced me that it would be a good idea to opt in to the GI Bill anyway.  I am certainly glad that I did.  The cost of the GI Bill was $100 per month for 12 months, only $1,200 to receive $18,000 worth of education.  I have never made, nor will I ever make, an investment with that kind of return.

          After the decades long degradation of all veterans benefits that peaked during the late 1970’s, Congress finally began to pay attention to veterans’ educations.  In 1984, Gillespie Montgomery was lead sponsor on a new GI Bill.  The Montgomery GI Bill was a major improvement over the previous generations of veteran’s education benefits.  For a brief time, the GI Bill would again pay for an entire four years of college.  Also included in the new Bill were improvements to VA health care and loan benefits.  The major negative in the new Bill was a time limit.  Inserted as a compromise to win support for the Bill, the time limit would cause the benefits to expire if they were not used by the veteran within ten years of their discharge.  This clause has been a small and misunderstood detriment to this benefit, and many a soldier has been talked out of signing up for the GI Bill because of it.

          Initially signed into law as a temporary measure, the Montgomery GI Bill has the distinction of being the first GI Bill to be issued during peacetime.  In 1987, Montgomery’s bill became permanent.  For over 20 years, the Montgomery GI Bill was a major recruiting enticement across all branches of the military. This gave rise to a generation of veterans who joined the military for an education.  This did not prove to be detrimental for readiness, as was an initial fear.  These veterans had the same rates of discipline problems as previous generations, proving detractors wrong.

          While the Montgomery GI Bill has had several benefit increases, the rising cost of college made the benefit less and less effective.  Over time, less and less veterans began taking advantage of benefits they had paid for.  The system was in need of a major overhaul once again.  In 2008, veterans would once again have a program of benefits they could be proud of.  Soon, the post 9/11 GI Bill would begin changing lives.

Shankar, R. (2009). Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008.        Harvard Journal on Legislation, 46(1), 303-321. Retrieved from     Academic     Search Complete database.

Cartoon retrieved from http://www.bluestemprairie.com on   11/29/2010

A changing world.

When I was growing up, I remember watching more than my share of war movies.  I consumed everything with American soldiers that I could find.  They fought Nazis.  They fought the Japanese.  The fought other Americans.  But the enemy they seemed to face the most was “Charlie.”  I was fascinated by films set in the Vietnam War.  This was the 1980’s and these films were full of all the action, coarse language and gore that excite the imagination of an elementary school boy.  The stutter of the machineguns and the sound of burning napalm was a part of the soundtrack of my youth.  It must also be admitted that Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” has always sounded best when accompanied by the chatter of a Huey helicopter.

Television was no less a source for material influenced by Vietnam.  The A-Team wouldn’t have traveled the country, righting wrongs and causing general mayhem without their Vietnam experiences.  Magnum P.I. wouldn’t have been able to solve every problem of the Hawaiian Islands without his skills earned from being a Navy SeAL during the war, either.  The ‘80’s were a true product of the Vietnam war.

Unfortunately, not all portrayals of Vietnam veterans have been so positive and comical.  As I grew up a bit I began to see how the public, at least Hollywood, saw the war veteran.  Every other week, whichever cop show seemed to have the Vietnam vet portrayed as a rapist, sniper and always as an alcoholic or drug abuser.  This lead me to ask some questions of the only person I knew with any experience with Vietnam.

Uncle Earl was an Army medic during the late 1960’s.  He completed at least one tour during the war.  He very rarely talked about it.  In fact, it wasn’t until 2003 that he really told me about some of his experiences.  He always skirted around talking about the violence, choosing instead to tell stories about the terrible monsoon rains or how great it was when helicopters would bring in hot chow.  Then the dam broke.  He told me about things he saw and his buddies who were hurt or killed.   He gave me the general sense of how horrible it was.  The things he told me about what it was like to come home were, to me, the worst of it.  He was one of those who heard people chanting “Baby killer!” and had people spit at him.  He also told me other stories of young men returning from the war having dog feces thrown at them, though nothing like that ever happened to him.  I could tell, after all he had been through, that this was devastating. 

After the decidedly warm welcome home the troops from the Second World War were given, this was a slap in the face.  Every veteran deserves better treatment than this.  The result of this change in attitude towards the Vietnam veterans was an increasing disregard for their post service benefits.  Were once the GI Bill had paid for a very good education, including schools of the Ivy League, the rising cost of education was far outstripping the benefits paid out.  In 1975, the tuition for Temple University in Philadelphia was $1500, or over half of the GI Bill benefits paid out to a veteran in that year.  This would continue to rise throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s.  Whereas the WWII veteran would have their books and tuition fully paid for and a stipend of $75 per month.  Various plans to correct this problem were proposed throughout the late 1970’s, but no real meaningful progress was made until The Montgomery GI Bill in 1985.

Also of note during this time was the utter failure of the VA Hospital system.  During the late 1960’s and 1970’s, the VA’s budget was dramatically reduced, despite the fact that more and more badly wounded veterans were returning from Vietnam.  Conditions in VA Hospitals, especially in areas with high populations, were appalling.  An excellent pop culture example of this was the 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July.  This movie depicts a paraplegic Tom Cruise living and recovering in a New York VA Hospital.  This is the true story of Ron Kovic, a Marine Veteran, who lived these experiences in the Bronx VA Hospital.  These facilities were later investigated by Congress, leading to the restoration or closure of the worst of them.

I sympathize with the Vietnam veterans.  Many were drafted and sent to a war they did not want to fight.  They returned home to a country that seemed to hate them, and we abandoned to the general public with no support and a rapidly degrading program of benefits.  America is still trying to make up for these shortsighted failures and will be doing so for years to come.

Leepson, M. (1977). Vietnam veterans: continuing readjustment. In Editorial research reports 1977 (Vol. II). Washington: CQ Press. Retrieved November 11, 2010, from CQ Press Electronic Library, CQ Researcher Online.

Image of Vietnam Reflections by Lee Teter retrieved on November 19, 2010 from:  http://www.qsl.net/n/n6tx//veteran/

How it all began…

June 22, 1944.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which would be known as the GI Bill of Rights.  He had seen the writing on the wall, 16 million GIs were about to return home from the most destructive war in the history of mankind.  They would rightly expect a reward for their sacrifice.  FDR needed only to look to the past to understand the importance of providing a comprehensive benefits package for these brave souls.  The eyes of history were upon him, he would not be found wanting.

A great deal of fear surrounded the creation of the GI Bill.  The wartime production boom, from the manufacture of everything from tanks to trousers, was slowing down.  Predictions of widespread unemployment for these returning veterans could potentially cause a second Depression.  Legislators in Washington could certainly not sit on their hands.  In response to this threat to prosperity, they drafted the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944.  In this bill, veterans were assured unemployment pay of $20 a week for up to 52 weeks, guaranteed home and small business loans, and assistance in finding employment.  While very few veterans took the offer of unemployment pay, one million of them attended colleges in 1946 and 1947.  By the end of the 1948 nearly half of those that qualified had taken advantage of the educational benefits.  In fact, from the end of the war until the end of the 1950’s half of all American college students were veterans utilizing their bill, the GI Bill.  This is a staggering number and shows the absolute success of this system.

With higher education came higher pay.  With higher pay came higher standards of live.  In effect, the GI Bill created the American middle class as we know it today.  This sense of obligation to our veterans, coupled with the real fear of total economic collapse, helped to fuel the economic booms that salted the later part of the 20^th century. 

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.  Despite repeated reworking of the original Bill, by the end of the Viet Nam War, it was a shadow of its former self.  No longer could a veteran return from war and have his or her educated paid in full.  A new day of mostly unused benefits and a drastic change in attitudes towards veterans in general was on the horizon.

Verstegen, D.  & Wilson, C. (2002). G.I. Bill of Rights. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 928-930. New York: Macmillan Reference USA. Retrieved October 22, 2010, from Academic Research Complete.

Image of FDR signing the GI Bill of Rights retrieved on November 12, 2010 from:  http://veterans.house.gov/benefits/legacy.shtml

It’s your future

I cannot do this.  Higher learning is out of my reach.  It is not out of my reach because I lack intelligence or lack the will to achieve.  It is a question of pure, cold economics.  I don’t come from a wealthy background, nor have I become a rich man by my own right.  I have two children and the need to support them is far more important than my dreams of education.  This will never work.

Nearly everything written above is true.  Except that I can do this.  There is a way for someone to further their education, even without riches.  Even with some children to take care of.  For me, that is the GI Bill.  None of my education would be possible without it.

For me, earning a degree has always been something of a dream.  Coming from a background where money didn’t exactly flow from the faucet and being, at best, a mediocre student, I never thought it would happen.  Until one day when I accompanied a friend to the local Navy recruiting office.  To make a long story short, I signed up and spend six great years serving my country and seeing the world.  At the beginning of my enlistment, I was approached about buying into the GI Bill.  The cost was $100 a month for twelve months.  I jumped at the chance.

Life being what it is, with a job and two children, this seemed like a bad investment.  Even with the Bill, I just wouldn’t be able to afford dropping everything and going to school.  Then the Post 9/11 GI Bill was formed.  Now that this amazing benefit would not only pay for tuition but provide a stipend to live on as well, doors opened up.  Now I would finally be able to achieve my goals.

In the next few weeks, I will explore what the new Bill means to millions of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.  Also, I will look back into the past, to the time when the GI Bill was the “New Deal” for millions of returning Second World War veterans and changed the shape of America.  And how along the way, the brave men and women that served after Viet Nam were left behind, stuck with a benefit that was refusing to change with the time.

Every man and woman that has worn the uniform has stood up for their country when others have lagged behind.  Read along as a country stands up for those who serve.

Citation: Image of USS Theodore Roosevelt on 11/5/2010 from the World Wide Web. http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/uss-theodore-roosevelt-headed-into-midlife-overhaul-02810/