A New Year's Gift

Lt. Col. Robert L. Bateman is a historian, blogger and author of two books about the military. He is  stationed in Washington, D.C. 

This is the slow time. Most of you will be using a higher percentage of “fillers” than you usually do, pulling out old stuff that can be recycled or renewed fairly quickly so that you can spend a little more downtime during the holiday season. Thank God for the “Best/Worst” list and the year-end roll-up, eh? That is OK; we readers understand.

With that spirit in mind, I present my own year-end list. A list of story ideas (and who does not, from time to time, need those?) that might be interesting to pursue in the coming year.

Now I also understand that the overwhelming majority of you are not in “military markets.” This is to be expected. America’s military is pretty small, and our posts are well scattered. But with an estimated 26 million veterans walking around this country, there is not a single one of you who does not report in a “veteran market.” During a shooting war, stories that deal with any aspect of the military attract close attention from these veterans. Anyone who does not believe this need only confuse the terms “squad” (9-14 people) and “squadron” (200-800 people) and wait a few minutes for the mail to start rolling in to your editor.

At the same time, who but the biggest papers has the resources to devote a reporter to the military/veteran beat? This list, therefore, is designed so that just about any journalism outlet, large or small, should be able to use at least some of what is offered here. The whole lot is based upon a very simple premise that every editor has been known to use from time to time: inversion. Take an assumption or bit of “common knowledge,” turn it on its head and examine the results. So, without ado, my suggestions:

* Triplicate and acronyms: Since at least the 1960s, the general perception of the armed forces has been that we are collectively ga-ga about acronyms and paperwork (particularly forms in triplicate). Personally, I believe this to be true. But I was conditioned to think this way even as a kid watching M*A*S*H, which portrayed a cartoon-like version of the Army. More tellingly, I have not been a civilian since 1989, so one could argue that I do not understand the “outside” myself.

The contrast comes to mind because of popular culture. The movie “Office Space,” is one source. The television show “The Office” (not to mention the cartoon Dilbert) is another. Those and others suggest that acronyms and mindless bureaucratic forms are even more dominant in civilian business world than they are in the military, regardless of the stereotype.

* Fakes: There is a local man who makes good money in part due to his reputation as a distinguished veteran [1]. Perhaps he is a judge or an alderman [2]. Maybe even a c ongressman [3].

Fake veterans come in many colors and stripes, but because of a general decrease in knowledge about the military (or military history) among the general public over the past couple of decades, it is becoming increasingly easy for these imposters to ply their stories. A few months ago, Stars and Stripes [4] did an investigation into the veterans’ accounts that had been submitted to the Library of Congress’s oral history project. There were 49 men who told their stories of courage “above and beyond the call of duty” and claimed that they had earned the Medal of Honor [5]. These stories the Library recorded and duly archived. The problem? Fifty percent (yes, 50%!) of those men were complete fakes. So were 32 out of 100 who said they earned the Distinguished Service Cross [6] (that is the second highest award for combat valor in the Army) and 14 out of 50 who said they had the Navy Cross. Of 144 who claimed to be prisoners of sar during Vietnam, 44 were not.

The Library of Congress never checked a single one of them. Fortunately, a journalist was around. But these stories abound. If more than 20 men have the gumption to tell the Library of Congress that they won the MoH, imagine how many more low-level frauds are walking around in your towns.

* Veterans and homelessness (or suicide): While we are on the topics of fakes. I have a simple query. In a completely unscientific test of a hunch, I started making it a habit to ask the various homeless beggars who daily make appeals to me in my city, “Are you a veteran?” Of the males, the overwhelming majority said yes, they were veterans.

Now I do have something of an advantage, knowledge-wise, so I would ask simple follow-up questions. When? Where? With what unit did they serve? As a military historian, I knew what the correct answers should be for just about anyone serving in the Army or Marines back to about 1947. As a current professional soldier, I knew what the answers should be for anyone who served in the past 20 years. The result? From roughly three dozen who told me they were veterans, about four seemed to be telling the truth.

Now as I said, that is completely unscientific, and moreover it relied upon my personal knowledge and education. Further, the possibility exists that my neighborhood (in southeast Washington, D.C.) may be anomalous. But even if my results are off by 100%, this would still be an immensely lower percentage than what we have been seeing major homeless advocacy groups claiming [7] these past few months. The New York Times [8] reported, uncritically, “Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation’s homeless. Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day, the National Alliance report calculated.” Nowhere in its story does the Times report that it checked for itself on these statistics.

Does this not raise anybody’s hackles or set off the “B.S.” alarm? Apparently not, since the same statistics from that same source were quoted, verbatim, by USA Today, Fox News, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Associated Press, among others.

The statistics presented most recently by the National Alliance claim that 23% of all homeless are veterans. The alliance asserts that there are “529,000 to 840,000” veterans who are homeless in any given year, that 47% of those veterans are Vietnam era and that 33% of them served in combat zones. So here is the question: Are these statistics true? Has any newspaper ever gone out and done even a local check on the numbers to see if they hold up? For starters, one might begin with the question: "How many Vietnam-era veterans were there in toto (less than 9 million), and how many served in Vietnam (2.5 million)?"
 
Let's make a rough hash at the numbers. The National Alliance is claiming that between 174,570 and 277,200 of the men who served in Vietnam combat zones are homeless at some point every year. That would not seem extreme, unless you knew how few men actually served in Vietnam over the duration of the war, which I just told you. Then the numbers start looking strange, especially when compared to homelessness overall. Even the largest estimate of overall homelessness asserts that only about 1% of all Americans are homeless in a single year. But according to those news items parroting the National Alliance reports, between 7% and 11% of all the men who served in Vietnam combat zones are homeless each year even now, more than 30 years after the troops left. So they are essentially asserting that Vietnam made a man 700% to 1,100% more likely to be homeless.
 
The math looks even stranger when the rate of homeless black men is compared to the number of black Vietnam veterans. In that case, it appears that it makes you 3,000% more likely to be homeless than the average American, but perhaps we’ll save an examination of that issue for another column.
 
There are, as well, several spin-off stories here. Why, for example, would so many of those men who told me that they were veterans (after asking me for money) lie? Most of them were not even very convincing liars, and it took one or two questions to get to the truth. (Several outright admitted the fact to me.) So what might be their motive for claiming they were veterans? Also, would that same sort of motive apply to homeless men being asked by an advocacy group whose funding, it is rarely noted, effectively depends upon the scale of the problem they exist to confront? Do any of the homeless advocacy groups actually check on the “veterans” veracity, going through military records to confirm that a homeless man who says he is a veteran actually is a veteran? You can surely see a trend here. It seems likely that if the Library of Congress, let alone Congress itself, is not checking on veterans, then the various homeless advocacy groups (who have attention getting headlines/statistics to gain) are not checking either. But that is just a hunch.

* Political inclinations: There is little doubt that on many social issues, the military usually follows the American public. (The exception to this general rule is in race relations, where the military has been in the lead since integration in 1947.) But since the late 1990s, it has been an article of faith among both political parties that the military is, essentially, Republican.

You might want to check that assumption. In a recent but little noted article, one reporter did the classic “follow the money” research. She reported on what a think tank’s study  found [9]: “This shift toward Democrats is most visible among members of the Army, who gave 71 percent of their money to Republicans before the war began. So far this year, members of the Army have given a mere 51 percent to the GOP, spreading their contributions nearly evenly between the two major parties.” (Time magazine only managed to slip it into their DC Blog Swampland [10].)

Send your thoughts to Bob Bateman [11], whose opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. government or the armed forces. Bateman was a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has written two books: "Digital War, A View from the Front Lines" [12] (Presidio: 1999) and "No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident" [13] (Stackpole, 2002).