An American Lion

I was tipped off to this at John Cole’s Balloon Juice this morning:

As national membership in the VFW dips — down from a peak of 2.5 million in 1992 to 1.5 million as of June — VFW posts have to change, Newberry says. Local posts are encouraged to welcome female vets, offer family friendly programs such as child care and to make veterans who are having trouble with civilian life feel comfortable. “You have to give them a reason to join,” he says.

American Legion membership is down from a peak of 3.3 million in 1946 to 2.6 million members at the end of last year, but has 50,000 more members now than in the mid-1960s, Raughter says. It is mailing invitations to veterans, including women, using Facebook and Twitter to tell them about the benefits of belonging, he says, and sponsors youth activities such as baseball to attract vets with young families.

Some younger vets aren’t getting the message. Sgt. Charles Brice, 30, who recently returned from Afghanistan, has a good impression of the VFW and American Legion and visited a VFW post once, but “bingo doesn’t really interest me,” he says.

Ardy Reed, 40, of Attala County, Miss., who was in a Marine Corps Reserve unit in the Gulf War, says he’s busy with work and his young family. He says he associates the American Legion and VFW with “older guys” who served in World War II or Korea.

And my reaction was this.

I was going to add that what’s REALLY missing are the WWII vets and the Korean War vets who rejected the VFW and the American Legion. Has anyone heard stories of how some looked at them as bogus service organizations for men who didn’t actually do any fighting in the war and which consisted of members who liked to throw their weight around, even though all they did was run a supply dump in Georgia or stay well to the rear when they could have been in a front line unit? Am I alone in having that perspective here?

I won’t go into details, but I do know of men who were members of elite American units that fought from D-Day to VE day and went home to find that the VFW consisted of jerks, assholes, and boasting fools who had never heard a shot fired in anger but were quick to yammer about their “war records” while having phony medals or no medals worth displaying. These men rejected those organizations and joined the Kiwanis, the Elks, the Sertoma Club, etc., in large part because they didn’t want to sit around hearing war stories from people who didn’t know the first thing about war.

There were quite a few who just didn’t want anything to do with the war. They avoided it where possible. Not all, of course—there were exceptions. I do think that the surviving combat veterans that spent more than 30 days in the front lines had a visceral reaction to war nostalgia and rejected it and went home and lived their lives very differently than the loudmouth supply clerk at the end of the bar who liked to claim that he shot forty Germans with a Springfield rifle while a French farmwife held onto his big meaty thigh.

Politics being what they are, certainly, that comes into play. But I believe that the pro-war and pro-Republican stance of the VFW in particular may stem from the fact that many older combat veterans refused to join.