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SUPPLEMENT: Amnesty and Discharges

By VVAW

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

Part of the answer is no jobs. For many vets when we can't find work, we can fall back on the GI Bill, pick up some job qualifications and subsist on the GI Bill while doing it. But even that option's not open to the vet with a bad discharge. VA 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 that war.

As part of his program to "heal the wound of 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.

Discharges and the overall question of universal, unconditional amnesty 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 always 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. Administrative 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 fought around the question of bad discharges as a part of the overall amnesty issue for years. Only the strength of the amnesty movement has forced the government to provide some concessions, but the fight for universal, unconditional amnesty is far from over.