In the US, only people who’ve been in combat are veterans. The fact that every person who has so much as enlisted gets FALSELY CALLED “veteran”, doesn’t MAKE them one.
Watching Americans give false honor and false glory to themselves personally, as they accumulate fake virtue points by pretending to honor the fake veterans, is either funny or sickening, or both.
Serving in the military but not seeing combat means you’re not a veteran? So what are the conditions? I mean I knew a lot of people that were in the Navy on my ship for Desert Storm, but nothing was shot at the USS Ranger despite actually being in the Persian Gulf. By your judgement, are they vets or false vets? My father served during Korea, never actually got close to combat, so not a vet?
Me, I was only Cold War, nothing hot, so I will have to resign myself as false vet in your mind.
We were going to take my father-in-law, who is a Korean War vet, out for breakfast on Sunday, but I woke up with a sore throat and we had to postpone.
There is large furniture chain who runs a ton of TV ads every holiday for their “Big <holiday> Day Sale!” Then at the very end of the ads in that really fast disclaimer voice they use so they hope you don’t notice, “Closed <holiday> Day.” I guess it’s a good thing that employees get to enjoy the holiday but it always strikes me as odd that the store is closed on the specific day that they are advertising a Big Sale for.
Cite?
It’s been 35+ years since I was on active duty and 25+ years since I was a drilling reservist and I suffer from PSF (post-service forgetfulness) so my remarks should be taken with hypertension-inducing levels of salt (I was Navy and am old so I could be called “an old salt”).
Anyways, Title 38 U.S. Code Chapter 1 VETERANS’ BENEFITS PART I—GENERAL PROVISIONS states:
(2) The term “veteran” means a person who served in the active military, naval, or air service, and who was discharged or released therefrom under conditions other than dishonorable. (Since the site pages have been reorganized, I can’t find the ATMB section [12?] to make links.)
DavidwithanR’s remark about seeing combat defining veteran status brings to mind SF-171, the application for federal jobs, which asked about veteran status and granted veteran preference points for service during defined periods of conflict.
To sum up, a member who served in the military during a defined period of conflict is a subset of members who served in the military, both of which are in the set of veterans.
I go to a bar that gives veterans their first beer for free. I try to get there early enough to pay for their second. Others have copied me over the years. The end result is that they can drink as much as they want without spending any money.
I wonder if he tells people with an proof of active duty “oh, sorry, if you’re active duty you’re not a veteran yet, and that’s who we’re celebrating on Veteran’s Day.”
I must admit, while I look forward to DavidwithanR coming back and admitting he just made up his own definition of “veteran”, and was talking out of his ass as usual, I also owe him some gratitude. I’ve struggled a bit with that whole “Did ya deploy?” aspect of veteran status. Intellectually I’ve come to accept that deployment is not necessary to be a vet, but still… And then our boy drops that turd and I was like, “Hey now! I did my bit and carved out a chunk of my life–don’t be taking that label away from me!”
A friend of mine spent Desert Storm getting planes loaded with shipments to the war zone. He was as proud of that certificate of service (I’m sure that’s not its proper name) as he was of his engineering degree, if not more. The people in the frontlines can’t do much shooting if the bullets haven’t gotten there, and that means someone has to do the loading.