A Promise Broken: Vietnam Veterans' Conceptions of Citizenship in their Fight for Post-Service Benefits

The Vietnam veteran experience has been studied from many different angles and been the subject of countless books.  This paper offers a new perspective on the veterans’ homecoming by examining how their fight for increased education benefits challenged their conceptions of their military service and of democratic citizenship.  Vietnam veterans conceived their citizenship as a relationship of reciprocal rights between themselves and the state: they had performed military service and, therefore, believed that they had earned the right to receive generous postwar benefits (in the same way that their World War II and Korean War predecessors had under their GI Bills).  When Vietnam veterans returned home from overseas service, they discovered that their 1966 GI Bill fell far short of their expectations and needs.  Two main strands of postwar political thought converged to keep their benefits low: Great Society liberals during the Johnson Administration reduced benefits in order to help those sectors of society they deemed more worthy of assistance, while fiscal conservatives under the presidencies of Nixon and Ford kept benefits low to scale back government spending and to fight inflation.  Throughout their public attempts to draw attention to their plight (such as protest marches, editorials, and Congressional testimonies), veterans highlighted how the government had broken an unwritten promise to them as citizens.  The failure of the government to follow through on its obligations caused many veterans to reevaluate their sense of obligation to the state and led many to lose faith in the federal government.  For them, the government’s reneging on its obligations had transformed the meaning of their citizenship which, in turn, led to a loosening of the allegiance they felt to the state.  For such veterans, military service did not have the same positive impact on citizenship that many previous generations of veterans had enjoyed.