I joined the Army straight out of high school. I was young, eager, and believed in something bigger than myself. Over the next twenty-one years, I served overseas in both combat and non-combat roles. I spent a combined more than four years of my life in training fields, sleeping outside on trucks, and under trees and tents and sometimes with one eye open in foreign countries. I learned how to survive and lead others to do the same. I missed funerals, birthdays, and years with my mother that I can’t make up now that she’s gone.
Through it all, I believed in the promise. I trained other people’s sons and daughters to believe in it, too – that if you serve your country, your country will serve you. That discipline and duty meant something. That the oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, bound us to a greater good. And that once you became a soldier, you’d always be part of something that would never leave you behind.
But now, I’m not so sure.
What I’m seeing today makes me question that promise. Veterans – men and women who kept their word – are once again being left in the cold while politicians play games with the government we swore to protect. We upheld our end of the bargain. And now, the very nation that taught us no one gets left behind seems to have forgotten those words when it comes to us.
Nearly 37,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs have been furloughed or are working without pay because of the government shutdown. These aren’t nameless bureaucrats; they’re the people who process disability claims, manage appeals, answer GI Bill questions, and help veterans transition from service to civilian life. They’re the ones who make sure the promises this nation makes to its veterans are kept.
When those workers are sent home or told to keep working without pay, it’s not just an administrative delay, it’s a message. It says that the well-being of veterans can wait. It says that the people who risked everything for this country are once again expected to be patient, silent, and grateful while politicians hold their benefits hostage in the name of budget negotiations.
We get led by headlines now. Every era has its lie: Voter fraud. Redlining. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The war on drugs. Lobbyists, bankers, preachers, and billionaires keep creating the conversation, spinning new reasons to divide and distract us. But we told the truth with our actions. We served. We sacrificed. We did what we said we’d do.
Some of us have also woken up to the truth behind those headlines. We’ve carried out orders in wars built on lies, believing we were defending freedom while realizing later we were protecting interests that had nothing to do with justice or humanity. That kind of truth breaks something inside you. And yet, even through that pain, most still believe in the values we were trained to uphold – honor, loyalty, courage – because those belong to us, not the politicians who abused them.
And now, after all that, we’re watching a government that can’t even keep its own word, debating whether the people who made freedom possible deserve stability and respect.
Somehow, we’ve reached a point where the people who kept their word to this country are being accused of defrauding it. Veterans are being told we have to prove our pain. Prove our service. Prove our worth.
To get help, we’re asked to find documentation from decades earlier, unit orders, deployment papers, medical records that might not even exist anymore. We’re told to track down old supervisors, to translate timelines and military terms into language the VA system will understand. And once we finally get it all together, it goes into a system so overrun and understaffed that we become nothing more than a case number on a screen unless you get lucky with a person going above and beyond exceptions.
The truth is, that same system that taught us to be resilient now demands that we justify every scar we carry. We have to prove the nights we don’t sleep, the days we can’t focus, the ways we’ve learned to hide anger or pain just to make it through work or family life. And all this while trying to hold down a job, pay rent, raise kids, and survive in a working class that’s already stretched thin and sinking fast.
The same government that will send us all over the planet to be violent will allow society to admonish and incarcerate or even deport you for not being able to manage emotions and in some cases literal chemical imbalances in the brain that these situations have caused. For many women who served, the scars aren’t just from combat zones but from surviving within their own ranks, in environments where protection wasn’t equal and respect had to be earned twice as hard.
So when politicians stand on podiums and claim veterans are gaming the system, it feels like another gut punch. We aren’t asking for special treatment, we’re asking for the truth to matter. We told the truth with our actions, but now the system treats us like suspects instead of citizens who’ve earned the care we were all promised. And the cruelest part is that this government keeps creating combat veterans, generation after generation, with war after war, each time making the same promise to care for them forever, knowing that promise can be broken.
They call us heroes on Veterans Day and frauds the next morning. And every time that happens, it chips away at the bond that once held this country together, the belief that service was sacred and sacrifice meant something.
Veterans are the American working class
Veterans don’t come home to luxury. We come home to work. We take off the uniform and put on steel-toed boots, aprons, hard hats, and name tags. We become truck drivers, teachers, construction workers, mechanics, nurses, and small business owners. We build the country we once defended. Veterans are the American working class.
But somewhere along the way, that truth got lost. Politicians stand at parades and wave flags, but when it’s time to pass a bill that helps working people, whether it’s raising wages, expanding healthcare, or protecting unions, they suddenly forget the same people they praise every November. They talk about patriotism while voting against the very things that would make life livable for the people who served.
It’s easy to say “thank you for your service.” It’s harder to make sure that service means something beyond a handshake and a soundbite. The irony is, the values that made us soldiers – discipline, teamwork, loyalty, accountability – these are the same values our politicians claim to honor but rarely practice.
We’ve learned to live on tight budgets, to do more with less, to sacrifice for something larger than ourselves. But that shouldn’t mean we’re expected to struggle forever. Veterans shouldn’t have to fight wars here at home just to survive an economy built for billionaires instead of builders.
If this nation truly respected veterans, it would respect the working class! Because we’re one and the same. Veterans of every background; men, women, black, brown, rich, poor; we all share this reality of being seen when it’s convenient and forgotten when it’s not.
If America is still listening, then hear this! Veterans are not victims and we’re not props for politicians. We are builders, workers, neighbors, and leaders. We’ve seen what unity looks like under fire. We’ve seen what it takes to hold a line. And we know that this nation only works when the people do.
But we also know that this nation’s workers can only work when their basic needs are met. And right now, billionaires and politicians are shifting our focus away from that truth, dismantling the very protections that were meant to shield us from their greed. We keep trusting wolves in sheep’s clothing, hoping they’ll fix the problems they created and profit from.
It’s time we remember who we are. Service to the people shouldn’t have stopped when we got out. It may have changed shape. But, if we accept the next mission as being right here at home – rebuilding trust, rebuilding truth, and rebuilding community from the ground up, helping guide what our organizations and churches and families should be focused on – we will have created a defense for what matters the most in our community’s wellbeing and safety.
We can’t wait on politicians who trade our futures for votes or headlines. We have to start where we live, organizing with the same discipline and purpose we learned in the military. Veterans have the credibility, the leadership, and the lived experience to bring people together across race, class, and political lines. We’ve already done it under the hardest conditions imaginable.
We know that if we stay ready, we don’t have to get ready. We have to push back against the myth that every veteran is conservative or that service somehow equals submission to a political ideology. Many of us came home with a clearer understanding of what solidarity really means. We know the cost of division because we’ve buried the people it destroys. Many of us also live with the moral weight of what we were asked to do, but carry that truth with honor now, not shame, because it drives some of us to demand something better from this country than the propaganda that sent us to war in the first place.
The truth is, progress and patriotism aren’t opposites; they’re supposed to be the same thing. To fight for justice, fairness, healthcare, housing, and dignity for every American isn’t anti-American – it’s the most American thing you can do!
So this Veterans Day, let’s do more than salute the flag. Let’s stand up for the people it’s supposed to represent! Let’s form and join groups in our towns and cities, and in our workplaces, our neighborhood schools, and lift our voices where we live. Let’s remind this country that service still matters, that honoring your community still means something, and that the people who kept their promise will keep fighting, not out of duty but out of love.
We didn’t disappear after we stopped serving. We’re still here. Let’s stop asking to be heard and start taking the mic back.
This piece was written with reflections from fellow veterans on the meaning of service, sacrifice, and solidarity in today’s America and our communities.
Shaun Walls is a member of the Pikes Peak Bulletin board. He is not paid for his writing here.
