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Reviewed by:
  • Homeward Bound: American Veterans Return From War
  • Betsy Loren Plumb
Homeward Bound: American Veterans Return From War. By Richard H. Taylor with Sandra Wright Taylor. Westport, CN: Praeger Security International, 2007. 192 pp. Hardbound, $49.95.

The study of veterans in history has elicited a number of provocative debates. One such discourse explores the extent to which the state has helped veterans readjust to postwar life or has hindered veterans from achieving the normative lives they sought after their wartime service ended. Governmental resistance, based on ideological opposition to social assistance or fears of budgetary [End Page 306] burdens, has often presented a great obstacle to veterans. Even when veterans surmounted that obstacle, bureaucratic red tape of the resultant programs conspired to deny veterans benefits. Rather than taking the stance that the U.S. government has often taken, that veterans pose problems which the state must solve, Richard H. Taylor contributes to this discourse by firmly establishing veterans’ agency in seeking their due benefits and by exploring the challenges the state posed to veterans’ successful reintegration into society.

Taylor dutifully illuminates veterans’ struggles by examining a variety of military experiences across rank, location of service, and military occupational specialty. His account proceeds chronologically, beginning at the American Revolution and continuing through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taylor compassionately explains veterans’ struggles to travel home, relate to their families upon arrival, continue their education, and seek employment and medical treatment for physical and neuropsychiatric injuries. He also discusses the government and public’s reactions to veterans and how those reactions both positively and negatively influenced veterans’ reintegration and their lives in a long-term perspective. For example, he chronicles the legislative development of veterans benefits like pensions and both the genesis and the constrictions of the GI Bill. Civilian support and opposition, the latter exemplified in Taylor’s discussion of civilians who spit on returning Vietnam veterans (127–128), figure prominently in the account as well. Taylor concludes that the gamut of military experiences gave way to a gamut of readjustment experiences and that, with veterans’ patriotic service in mind, the state and civilian population must continue to attend to these readjustment processes by providing support and understanding. Though the government and society learned more and more about the challenges of readjustment from one war to the next and slowly offered veterans small measures of assistance, they rarely reintroduced veterans to home front society with a full complement of aid and benefits. Veterans and their organizations continued to fight for these considerations throughout American history.

Taylor mounts a successful effort to locate the readjustment experiences of American veterans and communicate them with integrity, but the work suffers from a lack of originality. All Taylor’s references are dutifully cited, but he borrows most of his examples from well-recognized historical studies of veterans and the work reads as such (e.g., John Phillips Resch’s Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999], Richard Severo and Lewis Milford’s The Wages of War: When America’s Soldiers Came Home-From Valley Forge to Vietnam [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989], Robert Klein’s Wounded Men, Broken Promises [New York: Macmillan, 1981]). Furthermore, instead of [End Page 307] synthesizing those authors’ arguments, Taylor presents apparently randomly selected excerpts of individuals’ stories from those volumes. That objective gives rise to an adequate and useful bibliography for those readers just venturing into the study of veterans’ issues but leaves other readers hungry for original analysis. Taylor does incorporate primary research later in the work, but even those instances leave readers with more questions than answers.

Toward the latter half of the volume, Taylor catches the oral historian’s ear when he draws some of his sources from the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project (VHP) collection. This praiseworthy decision allows him to take advantage of a rich oral history collection not to mention digitized primary documents and memoir. Taylor’s interpretive decisions add little to methodological studies of oral history, however. The chapter on the Korean War yields a well-written story of a particular veteran’s experience...

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