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By the Numbers: Bad Discharges*
Sometime during the first Gulf War (1990-1991), George H.W. Bush’s war, to cement Ronald Reagan’s push to make the world safe for war again after the bothersome Vietnam Syndrome, a pamphlet was published by the American Friends Service Committee. I stopped being a fan of the Friends during that war because one of their chairpersons in Rhode Island came out to support Bush’s war. Much can be said about that war, about Iraq and that great democracy in the Middle East, Kuwait, but the facts on the ground pointed to aggression by Saddam Hussein, who would meet his fate under George W. Bush. A reader needs a scorecard to know when Hussein was an ally of the US and when he became an enemy. When it suited the US, Hussein, a dictator, was a friend and ally; when it didn’t suit the US, he became a Nazi, a script that has been repeated since World War II.
What got my attention in the Friends’ publication was the case laid out by its writer about the war, the Gulf War, presenting an opportunity to address the wrongs of the Vietnam era vis-à-vis those who had bad discharges. I’ve written about the wrongs done to both draft and military resisters from the Vietnam era, and the pamphlet showed the numbers behind those wrongs. The pamphlet is impossible to locate now.
Reagan had attempted to sanitize the Vietnam War with his “noble cause” rhetoric, but the truth of its brutality and staggering number of lost lives was known to many in the US and around the world. It might be said, and I’m not the first, that America, or the US share of America, lost its soul in Vietnam. A disclosure is that I’m a veteran of that era, but not of the war. The word “honorable” appears on my discharge, and for those interested in reading about my particular role in the antiwar movement from those times, read my memoir.
It turns out that Vietnam began an era in how the government dealt with veterans from that war and beyond. The issue here is the number of so-called bad discharges and how that number and percentage of soldiers who served in US wars skyrocketed following the Korean War. The number of men and women, largely men then, of course, who had bad paper was 1% during both World War II and the Korean War. That 1% in real numbers would have been much higher during World War II because so many more people served during World War II than in Korea. Sixteen million men and women served during World War II, while 6.8 million served during the Korean War. The literature on the exact number of bad discharges, bad discharges come in many kinds, but always harm the veteran, during the Korean War is hard to pinpoint. During the Vietnam era, 8.7 million men and women served.
The Vietnam era is easier to wrap one’s mind around because data was more accurate. I counted 393,000 bad discharges from that war, and this is the breakdown of that number: General unsuitability: 43,000; Undesirable: 20,000; Other than honorable: 250,000; Bad conduct: 23,000; Dishonorable: 2,000; For the good of the service: 55,000. These numbers have obviously been rounded off, but the numbers are staggering!
The post-9/11 numbers are: Less than honorable: 125,000. From 1990-2015: Less than honorable: 615,000. During the post-9/11 era, 3.3 million men and women served. The number of bad paper discharges surged after Korea to 2.5% during the Vietnam era and 5.8% during the post-9/11 era.
A library could be filled with the variables affecting bad discharges and why they rose following the Korean War. There has also been much written about how some of those in military leadership roles looked to reduce the number of veterans eligible for veterans’ benefits and the efforts made by the government to redress some of those wrongs, especially with men and women suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of war. It is also not the intent of this article to discuss the reasons for wars the US fought or supported through proxy agencies, nor is it its intent to use communism or nationalism, or simple expansionism under empire, or the projection of power in considering the large number of wars in which the US took part. The objective is to note the large number of men and women who served and who carried with them sometimes a life sentence of discriminatory treatment following their service.
The process of a veteran attempting to change the character of his/her discharge is a sometimes lengthy path unless the government has identified large numbers of veterans who should have been treated differently in the discharge process because of variables like post-traumatic stress syndrome.
*Many of the numbers in this article were gathered from Artificial Intelligence searches.