Today is Veterans’ Day, and it’s also the day Louise and I were married 54 years ago. Both of us grew up in houses where this day had a special meaning: her dad and mine both volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, as did hundreds of thousands of American boys and young women. And both came home to a country where Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy made sure the promises made to them were kept.
We’ve largely forgotten that part of the story — about the promises — and our media virtually never mentions them. Which is, frankly, a moral crime.
When our fathers came home, the GI Bill sent both of them to college along with nearly 8 million others in their generation. Louise’s dad finished college, got his law degree, and became Michigan’s Assistant Attorney General under Democrat Frank Kelly.
My dad dropped out after 2 years because my mom got pregnant with me and ended up working in a tool-and-die shop the rest of his life. He never forgot his dream of becoming a history professor, though; I grew up in a house with over 20,000 books in it, many of them about that subject.
Nobody called the GI Bill a handout; it was an investment, and it paid off handsomely. As I wrote a few years ago, the numbers are worth repeating.
In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill’s educational benefit cost the nation $7 billion. The extra economic output from those better-educated veterans came to $35.6 billion, and the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion, both in 1952 dollars. In other words, the US government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.
The best book on that time and subject is Edward Humes’ Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily Tribune:
“[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12 senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers, pilots and entrepreneurs.”
Free education literally built America’s middle class.
Every other developed democracy in the world — all the way down to Costa Rica — figured this out decades ago, which is why college is free or nearly free across most of Europe and many countries still pay students a stipend the way my and Louise’s fathers were given money for housing and books.
The Veteran’s Administration guaranteed both of our parents’ home loans, and VA hospitals were built and staffed across the country so our GIs would never have to beg for care. And all of it was paid for by taxing the morbidly rich at a top rate of 90 percent, a number that persisted through the presidencies of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and was lowered to 74 percent by LBJ, where it stayed through Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
Men like our fathers got hospitals, schools, and new suburban homes while the men who’d made the fortunes off the war paid the bill. That was the bargain that built the largest middle class in world history — the first to encompass fully two-thirds of all working people with a single paycheck — and my tool-and-die-maker dad could raise 4 boys, put us through school, take an annual vacation, and have a nice retirement because of it.
Since Trump launched his illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran with Bibi Netanyahu, the Pentagon reports 23 American service members have died and 865 have been wounded, although reporting in The Intercept suggests “Pretty Pete” Hegseth is lying about the numbers to make them look lower than they actually are.
Those men and women are joining patriotic troops whose service stretches back to our nation’s founding. But just since 9/11 gave Bush and Cheney an excuse to lie us into two other wars, 30,177 veterans of those wars have died by suicide, more than four for every one killed in combat (7,057); that figure is the latest available, but from 2021.
These Republican wars themselves cost us $5.8 trillion, all of it put on our national credit card, and at least another $2.2 trillion will be spent caring for the war wounded between now and 2050.
And it’s going to get worse. Mega-billionaire South African immigrant Elon Musk’s DOGE teenagers purged the VA of around 30,000 people in Trump’s first year back; the VA’s own inspector general found a 50 percent increase in staffing shortages, including doctors and nurses, in a single year.
The GOP’s proposed budget for next year will further cut the numbers of doctors and nurses, even as demand rises with a flood of PACT Act claims from burn pit survivors and those wounded from Trump’s war with Iran. It also cuts the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, the people who decide if a veteran whose claim was denied gets a second look, by more than ten percent of its staff (137 positions).
For fifty years, the morbidly rich oligarchs who fund the Republican Party have pushed to privatize the VA so it could become a profit center for billionaires that would recycle campaign dollars back to them.
When I was a kid, my dad gave me a copy of Smedley Butler’s book War Is A Racket, in which the most decorated Marine General in history wrote:
“WAR is a racket. It always has been.
“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
Both Bush’s and Trump’s wars and the ongoing GOP effort to immiserate and ultimately privatize the VA are exactly that racket that Butler was describing. The agency is both the largest integrated health system in America and consistently rated one of the best, and a bit over a quarter of its entire workforce are veterans themselves.
It’s pure socialist medicine in America: the government owns the hospitals and hires and pays everybody from the surgeons to the janitors.
Alex Pretti was one of those people, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital caring for people like my and Louise’s fathers, when masked ICE thugs shot him dead on a sidewalk in January while he was holding a phone. Within hours, the man who’s now the White House chief of staff was calling him a domestic terrorist; that’s how this regime thinks of the people who care for veterans.
Our parents’ generation came home from the Second World War and built a middle class and a nation reliant on peace and prosperity. They taxed the rich, educated the soldiers, cared for the wounded, and built highways, schools, and hospitals from coast to coast.
It was that way for thirty years until Reagan’s cronies began dismantling it in 1981; they’ve stolen over $79 trillion from the working class since then and dumped it into the money bins of the morbidly rich, according to the Rand Corporation think tank.
Today’s oligarchs want the wars and the profits they generate, but don’t want the bargain FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower promised my dad’s generation. Trump’s boys Uday and Qusay are getting defense contracts worth billions, and his Slovenian-citizen son Barron apparently has no interest in serving; no Trump ever has, since Donald’s grandfather came here as a draft dodger from Germany.
Louise and I were married on 11/11/72 at exactly 11:11 am in a church in Detroit. We chose that time because it was the precise moment — eleven minutes after eleven on the eleventh day of the eleventh month — that the Armistice was signed ending “The War To End All Wars.”
We’d been in SDS at MSU in the 1960s and were dedicated to peace; since we were going to get married that month it seemed particularly rich in symbolism, “The day the guns finally fell silent.” To the moment.