Memorial Day Reflections of a Veterans Lawyer

Today is Memorial Day, a federal holiday to honor those who died in military service. Because of the nature of my work, this year’s holiday is of particular significance to me, so I thought I would take this time to write about some of my reflections on the first 8 months of my legal career.

My day-to-day work has brought me much closer to veterans and the military than I have ever been before in my life, and I continue to learn more from my clients each day. For those of you who do not know, I currently work as a full-time pro bono attorney providing civil legal services to veterans and their families. I am hosted by the University of Miami Health Rights Clinic, which is a non-profit teaching law firm, and I am able to provide these services thanks to the financial support of Equal Justice Works, a national post-graduate fellowship program for new and aspiring public interest lawyers.

(Obligatory Disclaimer: All views expressed here are my own and not those of my employer or funders.)

The first thing I, a non-veteran civilian, realized once I started talking to veterans and learning about their legal problems is that I am, and always will be, an outsider. As an advocate, I must always be mindful of my outsider status. Being an outsider means that I must be an extremely careful listener and must actively seek to become more educated by my clients. I must also appreciate the privileges of my own social class and education and eschew judgment on my clients’ lives. Many public interest lawyers will share a similar sentiment when asked about working with underserved or marginalized communities.

In my view, though, it’s not enough to recognize that I am an outsider. I began to wonder why such a divide exists between those who enter the military and those who don’t and what that divide says about the current state of our country. Where I grew up and in my social circles, very few people enlisted in the military after high school. For those like me, the military is usually presented as an abstract and monolithic concept, used as a political tool by public officials or as rhetorical flourish on cable news when talking about the Defense Budget or Congress’ Showdown of the Month. Veterans are the subject of much sloganeering on all points of the political spectrum.

Many veterans leave military service and lead successful careers and fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, we also know from recent headlines of scandal at the VA and climbing suicide rates among veterans that our former service members do not always receive adequate care when they leave the military. So who are these veterans? Which individuals are more likely to fall through the cracks of our profoundly broken veterans services system?

In the early months of my job, as I was studying as much as I could about the government agencies with which I must interact daily, an astounding fact came to my attention: the United States Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer. What that means is that the Defense Department has more employees than even gargantuan multinational corporations like Wal-Mart, with personnel stationed all over the country and all over the world. If that is the case, I thought to myself, why is it that I, personally, knew so few people who serve or served in the military? How is it possible that an institution currently employing 3.2 million people can be nearly invisible to so many of us?

Several months later, a colleague (who is a veteran) made another observation that has stuck with me. “The military,” he said to me, “is the United States’ largest social program.” He continued, “People go into the military thinking that everything is going to be great and don’t realize how badly everything can go.” And it can go badly in so many ways, from numerous health issues to legal troubles, compounded by a complex and vicious cycle of problems that trap people in poverty.

At 17 or 18 years old, these individuals hear promises from recruiters about the opportunity to serve our country and to travel the world. The military offers training and a stable job with excellent benefits, like money for a college degree or a vocational certificate. But for every veteran who transitions from military to civilian life without difficulty, there are dozens who come back home to the same problems they hoped to escape or to new issues created by their military service.

And for many who volunteer, the military is a way to start a new life — to leave behind circumstances that leave few good options for upward mobility. But oftentimes, enlistment in the military is less a choice than a form of economic conscription. Enlistees are the individuals who endure deployments overseas. They live in the world’s most dangerous places and face unknown health hazards at the behest of the United States’ ever-evolving foreign policy goals. And they do so with a sense of unified purpose and selfless loyalty to the country that is rare in our individualistic American society.

Those like me, for whom a college education was the unequivocal next step after high school, do not generally hear the perspectives of these young men and women who take the military path. Since the United States ended the draft that hastened the end of the Vietnam War, our all-volunteer force has become less of a collective effort from all sectors of society and more of a social safety net for thousands of young people who have few other options to escape difficult economic circumstances. The military is the number one jobs program in the United States — perhaps the most pervasive, yet most invisible contemporary government social program.

So today, when I think about Memorial Day, I wonder what we are going to do to make good on our promises to the thousands of people for whom military service did not measurably improve their lives. For those who leave the military with physical and psychological injuries. For those who are discharged from the military straight into the cycle of poverty and homelessness. And for those who experience understandable challenges to re-entering the civilian world after years of institutionalization, not unlike those difficulties faced by the formerly incarcerated.

I hope that on this Memorial Day, you, too, will stop and think about what it means to truly memorialize veterans. Because the truth is, fewer and fewer of us have skin in the game beyond the act of paying taxes. We hear about the military and veterans as an abstraction and move on with our days. Politicians use veterans for photo ops while providing little meaningful reform to help those veterans in need.

Meanwhile, many veterans who are alive right now, like millions of others in our country, fall victim to disparities in health, economics, and education. They fight the foreign wars of the wealthy and come back to fight a bureaucratic war with the federal government to obtain even the most paltry sum of public monetary benefits. While advocates like me can help a small number of individuals, we cannot achieve fundamental social change unless the most privileged and powerful among us truly understand the human consequences of war and face the difficult truth that many thousands of people serve in the military largely because of necessity.

So on this Memorial Day, I will be thinking of those veterans who are struggling to get by; those who are physically and mentally disabled; and those who are among the many, many individuals caught in our country’s fraying social safety net.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

— Leah