“So few have served, and that it’s very easy for people say now that ‘I didn’t want these wars,’ but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t all part of this,” she said. In many ways, Americans today feel removed from the Global War on Terror and military conflict, True said. We have a disconnect in our society about what’s going on, who has served and what they experienced.” The experience of going to war and coming home - we don’t have as much awareness. “Now, less than 1 percent of our population has served. “In our society, we’ve seen this real shift,” she said. That small figure influences the way the general public thinks about the cost of conflict, True says. Today, out of a nation of nearly 329 million people, 1.3 million Americans are in active duty military, and another 800,000 serve in the reserves, according to the Department of Defense. “Even though there’s so much talk about the opposition and difficult experiences that Vietnam veterans had coming home with protests, there was still a sense that people were very close to someone who had served or knew someone who had served,” she said. She talks with veterans, primarily those who fought most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, and explores ways to use narrative as a tool for mental health care. And while fewer servicemembers enlisted during the Vietnam War era, the conflict’s draft cut across American society, explains Gala True, a medical anthropologist and folklorist with the Department of Veterans Affairs and contributor to the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. population were a part of the armed forces, according to Census Bureau and Department of Defense data. But today, because of factors like the political cost of launching a military draft and the increasing automation and outsourcing of military-related tasks, fewer Americans have a personal connection to someone in the armed forces.ĭuring World War II, about 12 percent of the total U.S. Not long ago, most Americans were likely to know an active military servicemember.
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