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Vet groups seek young blood

Soldierly camaraderie retreats in face of civilian pressures

Twelve years of uninterrupted war in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a new generation of American veterans.

Yet across the country, veterans’ service organizations are in crisis. Membership in the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans and Veterans of Foreign Wars has plummeted as their oldest brethren – those who fought in World War II – disappear one by one.

In Durango, these organizations, which have provided invaluable services both to local veterans and to the broader community for decades, are facing the problem headstone on.

Last year, about 40 veterans ended up in Hood Mortuary; mostly, the dead came from the generation that saved Private Ryan, said Clark Cunningham, who has been involved with the VFW Post No. 4031 for more than 30 years.

The VFW gave each of them a soldier’s funeral, and conducted dozens more in Bayfield, Cortez and Dolores, where slumping membership has forced VFW halls to close.

Vietnam vet Fred Riedinger said if new veterans “don’t start joining, we could go under.”

Veterans alone

In fall 2012, 111 Fort Lewis College students enrolled through the G.I. Bill.

But Bernard Wolsieffer, who has been an active member in the American Legion for the last four years, said it’s rare to encounter a veteran of the Iraq wars or Afghanistan at the Legion’s famous bar.

“We’ve had meetings about it,” he said. “But a lot of the young guys, they stay away.”

Through history, American veterans returning home have often walked a lonely path. In part, this is because civilians have always been somewhat ill-informed about the precise nature of their military’s ventures abroad.

The chasm between citizens’ and soldiers’ experience of America’s wars – and of what modern warfare requires, and takes, from our soldiers – has if anything grown more gaping since Vietnam, which ended the draft in favor of a professional, all-volunteer army, Riedinger said.

Before Vietnam, conscription meant wars touched every American family and every class of American:

In World War II, 12 percent of the population served in the armed forces. Today, just 0.5 percent of the population serves.

While fewer of us than ever before know firsthand the trials, physical sacrifices, ethical crises and long-term pain that confront today’s American soldiers, our new veterans are struggling – to find jobs, to find housing, care for families, deal with long-term injuries, overcome post-traumatic stress disorder and successfully re-enter a society that doesn’t understand their service.

Need more men

The public’s incomprehension of modern warfare may be deterring Durango’s young vets, eager to carve out a new civilian life, from embracing groups like the VFW, DAV and Legion.

“I think the younger guys come back, and they don’t want to be reminded of it. I am sure a lot of them saw some pretty gruesome things over there, and they want to distance themselves and move on with their lives in whatever fashion,” Wolsieffer said.

Still, the absence of young blood confounds and threatens local veterans’ groups. Another obstacle may be inter-generational perception: Many of the freshly minted Iraq and Afghanistan vets came of age in the 1990s, amid a raging debate about whether women and gays could serve without sullying the country’s honor or sabotaging the American military from within. These questions – once actively debated by older veterans – may strike today’s youth as quaint.

Riedinger acknowledged that to outsiders, the VFW bar might seem like a clubhouse for old, card-carrying, fuddy-duddy men. But he said as the ranks of the military have evolved, so, too, has the VFW.

“We’ve always been way ahead of society when it comes to integration on race and sex,” he said.

Wolsieffer said today, the American Legion has “half-a-dozen women vets, and most are as crusty as we are.” Meanwhile, the VFW is home to the Men’s Auxiliary, through which soldiers’ husbands and male relatives can now contribute with the same unsinkable spirit once expected from wives.

But older veterans acknowledged a deeper issue: The reason that younger vets are spurning the VFW’s pool tables and the Legion’s cheap bar isn’t, probably, to do with whether kids today think they’re cool, but to do with the country.

Cunningham said new veterans are coming home to a different America than the one that met veterans of Vietnam and Korea on their homecoming.

In this society, two-income families barely scrape by; there’s so little spare time; the old threads that tied communities together – stable jobs, stable families – have frayed to wisps, and veterans, like civilians, fight for survival against battering winds, said Cunningham.

“A veteran is still a veteran,” he said. “But today, people feel differently about joining the organization than 40 years ago. There’s not the family participation there used to be. Everyone’s too busy trying to make a buck. Both parents have to work now, and it’s very hard on families, so it’s very difficult for people to get together anymore.”

Still, the younger vets may boomerang. Wolsieffer said that after he was discharged, it was decades before he became interested in joining the Legion.

“Once they’re done raising their kids and going back to school and relieving themselves of the other burdens, we may see an uptick,” he said.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com

Though many men down, veteran groups soldier on

The Veterans of Foreign War’s mission is to “honor the dead by helping the living.”

Year after year, local veterans’ groups work to fulfill this votive promise – helping veterans access benefits and providing rides and roofs to those who need them – with ever-diminishing manpower and next to no money.

Clark Cunningham, who has been involved with the Veterans of Foreign Wars for more than 30 years, pointed to Charles Parnell, of the Disabled American Veterans, as a glowing example of the heroic, largely unsung work done by Durango’s traditional veterans’ organizations.

Three times a week, Parnell said, DAV drives groups of veterans to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque – a vital lifeline for many veterans in the Four Corners.

“I don’t get any money for it, and that’s the way I like it,” Parnell said.

He said the DAV strives to care for vets in all kinds of ways, an undertaking that includes looking after vets who are contending with post-traumatic stress disorder, homelessness, physical disabilities and social alienation, often decades after they’ve returned from deployment.

This month, the VFW’s Women’s Auxiliary group is filling up a “full horse trailer of coats, jackets, socks, pants and toothbrushes” to drive to the military retirement community in Buena Vista, said Cunningham.

“Many have no insurance, while some just need to know they haven’t been forgotten,” he said.



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