Old Veterans Organizations Are Fading Away
By Faith Bottum, 9/23/21, Wall St. Journal

Peggy Randle is 85 & lives alone with her cat, Max, in
Boulder City, Nev. She also fires rifles at veterans’
funerals. A nurse in the Navy during the Vietnam War,
Ms. Randle belongs to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and
other organizations that help provide military honors when
soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are laid to rest.

“The cat isn’t much of a conversationalist,” she says,
“& I still have something to give. I can still stand up
there & fire that M1. I can still help with the 13 flag-
fold. I can still do all of those things, & I’m gonna do
them as long as I can.”

Veterans across the country report the same experience:
declining membership in the VFW & American Legion, & the
difficulty putting together honor guards for funerals.
The VFW had its origin in 1899 gatherings of veterans of
the Spanish-American War. The American Legion began after
WWI, at a 1919 mtg in Paris. Both started as essentially
interest groups but quickly grew into vast national
networks of local social clubs.

Those clubs would host civic programs such as essay
contests, Friday fish fries & scholarships for veterans’
children. The American Legion’s summer baseball program
was once so extensive that few high schools bothered to
organize their own teams, & over 3,400 local teams are
still active today.

The VFW has around 1.5 million members, a drop of a
million from 1992. The avg age is 67, with 400,000 members
over 80. The largest org of veterans’ clubs, the American
Legion, has 2 million members, down from 3.3 million in
1946. Kenneth Hagemann, 59, is a retired Marine & deputy
adjutant of the VFW in New Jersey. There are 218 posts
left in the state, he explained, but “in 10 years, I think
it'll be 175. We go down every year.”

One reason is simply the decline in numbers of vets.
During WWII, acc. to the Dept of Veterans Affairs,
16.5 million Americans served in the armed forces.
Estimates of those who served in the war on terror over
the past 20 years hover around 3 million.

There’s another reason the old orgs are fading: Younger
vets simply don’t join clubs the way older generations did.
Partly this reflects a general decline in community orgs—
the sociological transformation that Robert Putnam observed
in his 2000 book, “Bowling Alone.” Americans aren’t joiners.
Not like they once were.

But the VFW & American Legion are also shrinking because
many vets from the past 20 years carry with them a more
ambiguous sense of both their military experience & their
relation to established American institutions. “Vets now
don’t look for comfort in person at clubs,” said Alexia
Hodgson, an Army 2nd Lt. in Anchorage, Alaska. Social
media, she suggested, fills some of the gap. “A lot of
vets I know . . . talk about their life & experiences, both
in & out of the military, over Reddit, Discord & Twitter. ”

“My generation engages in a different way,” added the
novelist Phil Klay, a retired Marine & winner of the 2014
National Book Award for his short stories about military
service in Iraq. “We tend to be more issue-focused than
the old local orgs”—and yet, he admits, “it’s important to
keep memories alive thru local rituals.” The difficulty in
providing honor guards, he said, symbolizes a worrisome
detachment of his generation from local communities. When
younger veterans do join a group, they tend toward newer
& more service-inspired national orgs such as Team Red,
White & Blue or Team Rubicon.

Something important is lost, however, when the local
connection is broken. “I was still on active duty when my
grandfathers passed away, & I went to the funerals in
uniform,” said Josh Hauser, a former Marine staff sergeant
in Hollsopple, Pa. “That was the first time I realized who
takes care of this very important thing, because it was a
local VFW that did the military honors.”

And what will happen when those old veterans’ clubs are
gone? The social-club model simultaneously integrated vets
into the local community & gave them a sense of national
importance. “I sometimes can’t comprehend how we’re able”
to get to all the funerals, said Robert Garlow, honor-guard
commander for VFW Post 36 in Nevada. “Yeah, we feel stretched
thin, but it’s something we really want to do.” Consciously
or not, they’re right to feel a personal & sociological
significance in what they do. The old local community orgs
understood the importance of attending funerals to comfort
the family & honor the service of the dead.

“They’ve earned it,” Randle explained. “And maybe someday
someone will think I’ve earned it, too.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/old-veteran-organizations-fading-foreign-wars-memorial-service-11632408009

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