Paying With Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran

Throughout this book, Kinder (history, American studies, Oklahoma State Univ.) capitalizes the "Problem of the Disabled Veteran" to highlight the enduring nature of the question of how Americans should think about veterans who return home permanently damaged in body or mind. His ambitious history begins with the Civil War's aftermath and ends with our current wars, but some two-thirds of the text is devoted to World War I, when more than 900,000 American service personnel applied for disability benefits and a Veterans' Bureau was established to address casualty on that scale. While attitudes toward disabled veterans shift over time, Kinder sees two persistent, competing "fantasies": that warfare can be conducted safely and that Americans will abandon war owing to its bodily risks. He also sees a persistent failure to learn from mistakes, resulting, despite progress in battlefield medicine and postwar rehabilitation, in a consistent pattern of neglect.