THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511100004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Before Veterans Day, which is today, there was Armistice Day, which marked the cease-fire in the conflict known variously as World War I, the Great War (which is the European preference) and the War to End All Wars.
Armistice Day was held in some awe by a generation or more of Americans, Canadians and Europeans who would never forget that the slaughter in World War I officially (though not in reality) ended in 1918 on ``the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.''
Many earnestly believed for a time that World War I had exacted such a monstrous toll that humankind would never again make war. Many believed literally that World War I had been the War to End All Wars.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George knew better. He had said, sardonically, while the war continued: ``This war, like the next war, is a war to end all wars.'' Unlike President Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George was no idealist. He did not see World War I, as the American head of state did, as ``the culminating and final war for human liberty.''
In the 1930s, everyone learned that warfare wasn't extinct. Italian Fascism, Hitler's Third Reich and Japanese militarist-imperialists had begun to march.
Woodrow Wilson died before that happened, but not before the United States, in revulsion against the carnage of World War I, refused to join the League of Nations, which he had done so much to bring into being. Neither the League of Nations collectively nor any of the economically depressed and demoralized Western democracies stand up to the aggression in the '30s when they could have been stopped it, saving 50 million lives.
Armistice Day gave way to Veterans Day years ago. And Veterans Day is, like most other special-occasion days, notable primarily as another sale day in the great American retail market. Comparatively few U.S. war vets consider the day special.
But note:
Nearly 42 million Americans (including a million Confederates) have fought in America's wars.
More than a million participants in those wars died in service.
Not everyone who's worn an American military uniform qualifies as a war vet; only those who served during designated war periods. Of the 26 million former U.S. service personnel alive today (roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population), 20 million are veterans.
Since 1988, veterans have been represented by the Cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs, which recently warned that Medicare cuts headed for passage by Congress could increase the health-insurance premiums of ``as many as 8.8 million veterans'' and proposed Medicaid cuts could cause ``as many as 171,900'' veterans to lose coverage in 2002. Congressional Republicans responded to the warnings by criticizing Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown for engaging in ``cheap politics'' and ``misusing the power of his office to scare the wits out of VA employees and the veterans they serve.''
A spokesman said Brown, who is a disabled vet, would ``remain a veterans' advocate and . . . continue to let them know what is going on.''
Meanwhile, the VA's fiscal 1996 operating budget is $38 billion. More than half of the department's spending is for compensation, pensions and education benefits, while 44 percent is for medical care, 2 percent for hospitals, national cemeteries and other construction programs and 2.7 percent for operations.
Not only veterans but also their dependents and their survivors are potentially eligible for benefits - that is, nearly a third of all Americans. Veterans Day may not be big deal. But veterans' politics is something else. by CNB