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Amnesty and Discharges

By VVAW

What happens to the vet with the bad discharge? The question is vital to over 600,000 Vietnam-era veterans.

Part of the answer is no job! For many vets, when we can't find work, we can fall back on the GI Bill, pick up some job qualifications and subsist (at least barely) on the GI Bill while doing it. But even that option's not open to the vet with a bad discharge. V.A. care is also denied to those veterans.

Of all the leftovers from the Vietnam War, vets with bad discharges may well be the most pointed reminder of what happened during that war. Thousands of bad discharges were handed out through the military "justice" system for what were simply acts of resistance to the war.

As part of his program to "heal the wounds or Vietnam," President Carter came up with an amnesty which, as he originally presented it, would solve the problems of vets with bad discharges by providing a simplified discharge upgrading procedure. The program was a fake which did little for the vets enrolled, and which had the guts cut out of it when veterans benefits were denied to the participating veterans. The results of the program were so bad, so few vets applied for the upgrading, that the government has never made the results public. This brilliant track record should be taken into Consideration during Vietnam Veterans Week when Carter talks about "honoring" vets, particularly when any of the flunkies put in appearances around the country during the week.

There are individuals in some agencies around the country, and independently funded upgrading projects that are processing upgrade requests hand over fist with good results. We would need, however, a thousand of these projects to handle a small percentage of the upgrades. Even with an upgraded discharge in the "general to honorable" category, however, the vet finds that the federal government is holding benefits in limbo somewhere in the political system, hoping that these 600,000+ vets will go away. They won't!

Discharges and the overall question of amnesty which is universal and unconditional get to the heart of the lessons of Vietnam--it is right to resist an unjust war and amnesty recognizes this fact. It also gets at the military's Uniform Code of Military Justice which has alway been a tool for the brass to control the troops. There has never been much pretense that the UCMJ was "just." Bad discharges have been passed out for whatever the brass decided it didn't like. Black GI's got way more than their "share" of these discharges. Administration discharges, usually "undesirable" were given out by the handful to GIs who took them rather than go through the hassle of a court martial and who just wanted out.

VVAW has, for years, fought for universal and unconditional amnesty, including a retroactive single grade discharge. We'll take what we can get; upgrading of discharges is better than nothing. But we don't intend to give up this struggle until the "bad" discharge and the problems that causes for hundreds of thousands of veterans is set aside.

SINGLE-TYPE DISCHARGE FOR ALL VETERANS;
UNIVERSAL AND UNCONDITIONAL AMNESTY FOR ALL RESISTERS!