Seven Myths About Veterans That Shape Bad Policy, and the Facts

Hollywood has two kinds of veteran. There is the haunted wreck who sits alone in a dark room waiting for a flashback, and there is the sad sack who needs a check and a pamphlet. A third kind, the guy who came home, went to work, raised a family and now coaches Little League, does not photograph as well, so he rarely gets a part.

That third veteran is the most common one. And the gap between the movie version and the real one is not just an annoyance. It is the source of policy mistakes. Lawmakers who believe veterans are fragile legislate for fragility. Employers who believe the same decline to hire them. Charities raise money on a picture that bears little resemblance to the people they say they are helping. So let me do what a good host does and put seven popular claims on the table, test each against the record, and tell you where the record is solid and where it is not. I will mark the uncertain parts plainly, because a post about myths that tells new ones is a poor advertisement for itself.

Myth one: most veterans come home broken

The claim: military service, especially combat, leaves most veterans psychologically damaged.

The record: Post-traumatic stress is real, and so are traumatic brain injuries, and the Department of Veterans Affairs treats hundreds of thousands of veterans for them. Nobody serious disputes that. The error is in the word "most." The great majority of those who serve do not develop a lasting disorder, and a large share of those who serve were never in combat at all. The military is a large organization with a long tail of supply, maintenance, logistics, medical, administrative and technical jobs. The VA's National Center for PTSD estimates that in a given year about 15 of every 100 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 14 of 100 of the Gulf War, and 5 of 100 of the Vietnam War have PTSD, rates that vary by era and by exposure and are well short of a majority.

The verdict: false as stated, and harmful. A veteran who is told by the culture that he must be damaged may start to believe it, and an employer who believes it will not call back. The accurate picture is that a minority have serious service-connected conditions that deserve excellent care, and the majority are healthy, capable people who got a lot out of the experience.

Myth two: veteran homelessness is out of control

The claim: the streets are full of homeless veterans, and the number keeps growing.

The record: Each January the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with local agencies and with the VA, conducts a point-in-time count of homeless people, with a separate tally for veterans. By those counts veteran homelessness fell substantially in the years after 2010, to less than half of the level that year, driven by a combined effort of housing vouchers, outreach and case management, much of it with bipartisan support. The count does not capture everything: it is a snapshot taken on one night, it depends on the volunteers who do the counting, and it misses people who are staying with friends. And veteran homelessness has not been eliminated. Some local numbers rose in later years as rents climbed.

The verdict: the claim of an ever-growing crisis is wrong, and the claim that the problem is solved is also wrong. The policy lesson is a useful one for conservatives. The decline was achieved by targeted programs aimed at a defined population, with a measurable goal, and it is a case study in how focused effort works better than a general promise. The rise in housing costs that pushes veterans and others onto the street is a different problem, and a better answer is to build more housing, which I return to in Rent control's record from Stockholm to San Francisco is the same story.

Myth three: veterans cannot find work, or employers fear them

The claim: veterans are unemployable, or are a bad hiring risk.

The record: The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an annual report on the employment situation of veterans, based on the Current Population Survey. The unemployment rate for veterans has swung up and down with the economy and with the cohort being measured. Younger veterans, those who served after September 2001, have at times had higher unemployment than non-veterans of their age, especially around the Great Recession, and in many other years the rate for all veterans has been at or below the rate for non-veterans. So the claim is true in some years for some groups and false in others for the rest.

What is solid is that veterans carry skills that employers pay for: they have shown up on time, led teams, handled equipment worth more than most companies own, and worked under pressure. The services have long run programs to translate that experience into civilian credentials, and the skilled trades have been recruiting from the ranks for decades. For the broader argument about why skill and experience beat a pile of debt, see Four Years of Wages Versus Four Years of Debt, the Apprenticeship Math.

The verdict: mostly a myth. The accurate statement is that veterans do well when they are matched with a job that uses their training, and badly only when the translation fails. That is a problem of licensing and credentials, which government can fix, since it has built many of the barriers.

Myth four: twenty-two veterans take their own lives every day

The claim: twenty-two veterans die by suicide each day, so the number is a measure of how badly the country treats them.

The record: This one is worth taking carefully, because it matters, and because both sides misuse it. The figure comes from a 2012 VA report on suicide data that used death records from a group of states, which did not include all states, and extrapolated nationally. The VA's later reports have used more complete data and arrived at different daily numbers depending on the year. Those later reports also compare the rate among veterans with the rate in the general population after adjusting for age and sex, which complicates simple comparisons.

None of that makes the issue small. Every one of these deaths is a tragedy, and the VA's own reports show that the rate among veterans is higher than among non-veteran adults after those adjustments. The VA publishes a National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. If you want the current count and the method used, that is the place to look, not a slogan on a bumper sticker, and I am not going to quote a figure for the latest year here because the number changes and I would rather send you to the source than risk giving you a stale one.

The verdict: the twenty-two figure was a real number from a real report in its day and it is not a constant. It is a fact about a particular year's estimate that became a slogan. Treat suicide among veterans as a serious problem whose scale you should check at the source, and be wary of campaigns that use the figure as a fundraising device without saying where it came from. The policy answer is not a slogan either: it is access to care, means-safety counseling, connection with peers, and a system that answers the phone. That last item brings us to the VA.

Myth five: the VA is hopeless, so scrap it

The claim: the Department of Veterans Affairs is irredeemably broken, and the right answer is to dismantle it.

The record: In the spring of 2014 reports surfaced that the Phoenix VA medical center had kept secret waiting lists to hide long delays in scheduling appointments. The VA's Office of Inspector General investigated and, in an interim report at the end of May 2014, found more than 1,700 veterans seeking care at Phoenix who were not on the official electronic waiting list, with a first-appointment wait far longer than the hospital had reported. The Secretary, Eric Shinseki, resigned in May 2014. It was a real scandal, and it was a real betrayal of people who had been promised care.

But the lesson of Phoenix is not that the whole system is rotten. It is that a monopoly provider, with its own internal incentives and a system for measuring its own performance, will game the measure. And the response of Congress illustrates what a conservative reform looks like: the Choice Act of 2014 and the MISSION Act of 2018 gave veterans the option of private care when the VA could not provide timely access. Independent studies of VA care quality have produced mixed findings, with the system doing well on some measures of quality compared with private care and poorly on access. Both are true. The fuller account is in The VA MISSION Act Let Veterans See Private Doctors, What It Changed.

The verdict: the claim that the VA cannot be reformed is false, and the claim that it needs no reform is equally false. Do not scrap it. Give veterans choice and hold the department accountable for what it does.

Myth six: veterans are one political bloc

The claim: veterans vote together, or are a single-issue constituency that any politician can sway with a flag.

The record: Veterans are a large and varied population, spanning those who served in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the wars after September 11. They differ by age, branch, rank, region, race and politics. I will not quote a poll, since polls move and I would be making them up if I tried to remember. What I can tell you is that politicians who talk to veterans as though they were one voting bloc keep making a mistake: veterans, like everyone else, care about jobs, taxes, schools and their own families. They also care about the specific things the military and the VA do for them, and that is the subject on which a good representative can earn their trust.

The verdict: myth. And the corollary is useful: a candidate who treats veterans as a bloc to be flattered will lose them to one who treats them as citizens to be served.

Myth seven: veterans do not hold public office anymore

The claim: Congress used to be full of veterans, and now almost none serve in office, so the nation's leaders do not understand the military.

The record: Part of this is true. After World War II, a very large share of members of Congress had served in uniform, a majority for many years, and presidents from Eisenhower through George H. W. Bush all wore the uniform. The share has fallen steadily since the draft ended and the generation of the Second World War retired. The decline is real, and it is visible in the historical rosters.

But two cautions. First, I would not give you a current percentage here, because the figure changes with each election and you should check the current roster rather than trust my memory. Second, the decline reflects the success of the all-volunteer force: when the military is a small portion of the population, a small portion of the legislature will have served. The argument for the volunteer force is in Ending the Draft in 1973 Was a Conservative Idea, and It Worked, and this is the price of it, which I think is worth paying but should be noticed.

The verdict: partly true. The share of veterans in office has fallen from its postwar peak. What to do about it is not a matter for legislation but for voters, who can look at the biography of every candidate and weigh what they find.

The bonus myth: the GI Bill was a handout

One more, because it comes up. Some people treat veterans' education benefits as charity. The record is the opposite. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, the GI Bill, was a bargain: a country that had asked millions to leave their jobs and schools offered tuition, training, and home and business loan guarantees in return. Millions of veterans used it. It helped build the postwar middle class and was among the most successful pieces of social legislation in American history. It is also a conservative model: benefits earned by service, delivered to individuals who choose how to use them, with no government-run school system required. If every federal program worked that way, the budget debates would be shorter.

The argument underneath

Here is the numbered argument, since there is one in all of this.

One. Policy built on a caricature fails the people it is meant for. Pity is a poor basis for a program, and so is a stereotype.

Two. Targeted problems need targeted answers. Veteran homelessness fell when government and communities aimed at a specific population with a specific tool.

Three. Choice and accountability do more than slogans. The reforms after the Phoenix scandal gave veterans options and the department an incentive to compete.

Four. Counting must be honest. A number repeated without its source, like the twenty-two figure, can mislead as much as it informs, and honest advocacy cites the year and the method.

Five. The best thing a country can do for its veterans is to treat them as the capable citizens most of them are.

I would add the Founding anchor. The Constitution gives Congress the power to raise and support armies and to make rules for their government, in Article I, Section 8, and Congress has long understood that this includes the promise of care for those who served. The principle is old: a republic that wants to be defended must honor its defenders with facts and not with myths. For the wider case on how the country should treat its defenders and its military, see The Pentagon Has Never Passed an Audit, and Conservatives Should Mind.

The case in brief

1. Most veterans come home healthy and productive, and a minority need serious care, so policy should aim at the minority without insulting the majority.
2. Veteran homelessness fell sharply after 2010 because of targeted programs, and the lesson is that focused effort works.
3. The twenty-two a day figure came from a 2012 report with limited data, and the current numbers should be read at the VA's annual report.
4. The Phoenix scandal of 2014 led to reforms that gave veterans choice, which is the right direction.
5. The GI Bill is a model of earned benefits with individual choice.

What you can do: Look up the VA's National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report and the Bureau of Labor Statistics veterans employment release for the current figures, and share the source, not the slogan.