Summary
This paper uses data from focused interviews to look at how veterans who served primarily during the peacetime Cold War portrayed the effects of military service. Most veterans described being a soldier, sailor, or airman as a neutral, transitional role. Veterans also described their service as having features that are consistent with views of such service as both a positive turning point and a negative disruption. However, only one veteran described military service as operating as a positive turning point in his own life, and just two described it has having been a disruption in their lives. In addition, veterans who served as officers described learning leadership and confidence in the armed forces, which may help explain an observed quantitative officer premium. This latter finding is consistent with a view of the armed forces as facilitating the accumulation of advantage.
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Extract
The Cold War and Modern Memory: Veterans Reflect On Military Service1
More than five million individuals entered the US armed forces in the years 1954-64, the decade of the cold war between the Korean and Vietnam Wars (Flynn 1993). According to the 2000 census, more than a third of men in their early sixties, those approaching retirement, served in this peacetime period. Yet, little is known about how the relatively common experience of this peacetime service affected the later lives of these veterans. The following paper looks at how some of these men interpreted the effects of serving in the armed forces on their later lives.
The paper extends previous research by looking at how veterans described the effect of military service when asked to do so themselves. Previous research has looked at how military service affected veterans, but much of this research has focused on quantitative effects. Economists and sociologists have explored the extent to which military service shaped veterans' educational, occupational, and economic attainment. Quantitative research regarding the impact of military service on individuals' lives has reached a variety of conclusions, suggesting that the impact of service depended on race, educational attainment, rank, draft status, and the timing and era of service. The quantitative effects of service were negative for some, but positive for others. On average, veterans had lower socioeconomic attainment than their nonveteran counterparts (Angrist 1990; Fitzgerald 2006; Imbens and Van der Klaauw 1995). For the most part, these negative effects were not long-lasting. Veterans may have had an initial disadvantage relative to nonveterans, but overcame that disadvantage with time in the civilian labor force (Card 1983; Maas and Settersten 1999). In some cases, veterans later surpassed nonveterans in their socioeconomic attainment (De Tray 1982; Teachman 2004; Xie 1992). In addition, some minority veterans and veterans with juvenile arrests experienced military service as a positive turning point, leading them to achieve better outcomes than they would have otherwise (Laub and Sampson 2003; Lopreato and Poston 1977; Poston 1979; Sampson and Laub 1996). Yet, the mechanism by which military service exerted a penalty or provided a premium is not known.This paper builds on previous research that looked at how veterans who served in World War II and the years immediately afterward assessed their service (Elder, Gimbel, and Ivie 1991; Laub and Sampson 2003). It uses data from focused interviews to shed light on how veterans of the peacetime cold war described the effect of military service on their life course trajectories. It takes a long-term view of how military service shapes attitudes, presenting the interpretations of veterans who served in the military on ...See the full content of this document
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