Class Warfare: A Disability History of Vietnam War Veterans

United States combat ground troops landed in Vietnam in 1965 and remained there until 1973. During the war years, the state’s public rhetoric regarded military service as a way to broaden the occupational horizons of both enlistees and draftees, and it used that idea as a recruitment tool in the poorer areas of the nation, mainly its inner cities and rural areas. The reality was far different as fighting in Vietnam left most veterans with few marketable job skills. Moreover, eight years of ground combat led to almost 300,000 wounded men; of that number more than 20,000 were left permanently disabled and they faced challenges in their attempts to reintegrate back into society. What made that reintegration particularly difficult was that because the majority of the ground troops were from working-class and working-poor populations, most had entered into military service with limited educations and skillsets.

I contend that those men from the lower socioeconomic groups were over-represented in the post-war numbers of unemployed and underemployed veterans, due to the intersection of class with disability, made worse by the economic recession of the 1970s. This paper explores the larger significance of this for American society, as well as the limits of the state’s rehabilitation efforts for these men.