Obligation

What do we owe our veterans?

It’s a timely question, as the nightly naming of American service-members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan on the PBS Newshour has largely given way to stories about veterans struggling with physical and psychological wounds and of alarmingly high rates of suicide. But the question is not only what the nation owes those injured in its wars, or even how—or whether—to assist veterans’ reintegration into civilian society. As war veterans use their status to claim authority in policy debates and public discussions—whether about gun control or the debate over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, about domestic politics or foreign policy—they also raise the question: what do we, as a nation, owe our veterans?

The question of obligation is, in very different ways, the starting point for both James Wright’s Those Who Have Borne the Battle and Stephen R. Ortiz’s edited collection, Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics. Both promise to historicize the question: Ortiz and his contributors through careful analysis of veterans’ policies and veterans’ politics in the twentieth-century United States and Wright in a discussion of how Americans have “mobilized for their wars and how they have celebrated and looked after those who have fought the nation’s battles” (p. 1). Although Wright argues that public attitudes toward specific wars shape how veterans of those wars are treated and that notions of obligation change over time, his book is grounded throughout in a sense of moral obligation—even when his historical argument seems to run counter to it. Ortiz’s contributors, on the other hand, investigate the evolving ways that notions of obligation are negotiated by veterans, politicians, and policymakers in ideological contests that are often complicated by the symbolic weight veterans carry in American political culture.

In keeping with his moral charge, James Wright addresses us as citizens rather than as scholars. He writes of a nation that has so narrowed the reach of military service that the men and women who serve and sacrifice and suffer— most particularly those who are sent, in America’s name, to kill and possibly to die—have become abstractions to the rest of us. He writes of “the generic use of heroism” (p. 271), of the manner in which such “heroes” are honored at a distance in ways that are symbolic or sentimental but that allow most Americans to ignore the costs of war as measured in human lives—whether of those who were lost, in those who returned, or for those who welcomed them back. (In a brief aside, Wright makes clear that his focus on “Americans and their wars” should not be read as indifference to the cost borne by the nation’s enemies; “Wars are remarkably cruel things,” he notes, “and all participants on all sides deserve to have their stories told” [p. 17].)

Wright calls his work a “meditation” (p. 1), and the mix of autobiographical context, emotional engagement, and concrete proposals for action he offers moves his work beyond the traditional realm of historical analysis. Wright built this book from the Jefferson Lecture he delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in early 2010. Its roots, however, lie in the powerful reaction he had to the battle for Fallujah in 2004 and his resolve, in the months and years that followed, to do something to help those who had been wounded in the continuing wars. Wright—who, himself, had been one of the eleven out of twenty-five boys in Galena (Illinois) High School’s 1957 graduating class to join the military—visited Bethesda, Balboa, and Walter Reed hospitals, going bed to bed, speaking with young men who were seriously injured. While serving as president of Dartmouth College, he worked with...