scholarly journals Heroes at Home: Honoring our Nation’s Veterans

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Kayla Vasilko ◽  

There are currently 17.42 million veterans living in America today. These heroes dedicated their services in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Gulf War, leaving home and giving up the comforts of stability, family, and guaranteed safety to ensure that America remains a stable and safe place for individuals and families to call home, yet upon returning home themselves, our nation’s veterans have had to face immense hardships. About 40,000 veterans are without shelter in the U.S. on any given night; some of the leading causes of veteran homelessness include PTSD, social isolation, unemployment, and substance abuse. This is why programs such as the Porter County Veteran’s Treatment Court (PVTC), Folds of Honor, Southshore Friends of Veterans, and Disabled American Veterans designed to support our nation’s veterans are so important for our community. This reflection details my research into each one of these Northwest Indiana organizations. In this account, I illustrate the impact of dozens of one-on-one interviews with the heroes running these programs, and veterans a part of these programs themselves. A special focus is placed on the results of the Purdue University Service-Learning grant received on behalf of the PVTC within that treatment community. During interviews, veteran Bob Carnegy stated: “People don’t understand the meaning of the word veteran. Each one is special, yet connected. No matter what branch they serve, each veteran had to raise their right hand and pledge their life to this country. That pledge is what connects us all.” Going off of his words, this reflection marks an overall goal of increasing awareness for the great acts of service our veterans perform, not just overseas, but also when they return home to the community.

Author(s):  
Alice Baldwin-jones

This chapter explores the life and work of Charles Preston Warren II, a pioneer theoretical and applied forensic anthropologist who made significant contributions to Philippines studies. As the longest serving military forensic anthropologist, Warren identified America’s dead from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He also worked with the county sheriff’s office and medical examiner office in Chicago and Indiana. He conducted research among the Palawan of the Philippines and disputed the prevailing classification based on skin color of the various ethnic black Asians populations known as Negritos, arguing instead that they differed culturally from each other.


Author(s):  
Matthew Smallman-Raynor ◽  
Andrew Cliff

In the last chapter, our consideration of camp epidemics ended with an examination of a strange and debilitating illness that, prior to World War II, was hardly known to medical science—Q fever or ‘Balkan grippe’. Historically, Q fever is one of many seemingly ‘new’ diseases that have suddenly and unexpectedly erupted into military conciousness. In Chapter 2, for example, we saw how maladies such as the mysterious English sweating sickness, along with venereal syphilis, typhus fever, and yellow fever, appeared—ostensibly for the first time—in association with wars of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. More recently, trench fever (World War I, 1914–18), scrub typhus (World War II, 1939–45) and Korean haemorrhagic fever (Korean War, 1950–3) provide twentieth-century examples of the emergence phenomenon (Macpherson et al., 1922–3; Philip, 1948; Gajdusek, 1956). At the same time, wars have also served to fuel the epidemic re-emergence of many classical diseases, of which human plague (Vietnam War, 1964–73), visceral leishmaniasis (Sudanese Civil War, 1956–), and diphtheria (Tajikistan Civil War, 1992–) are recent instances (Velimirovic, 1972; Seaman et al., 1996; Keshavjee and Becerra, 2000). In the present chapter, we develop the theme of war and disease emergence and re-emergence, taking selected conflicts and diseases in the Asian and Far Eastern theatres to provide examples. We begin in Sect. 9.2 by locating war within the broader conceptual framework of emerging and re-emerging diseases. Subsequent sections examine the wartime emergence of three zoonoses which, on their novel appearance in deployed western troops, prompted a series of landmark epidemiological investigations into the diseases concerned: scrub typhus among Allied forces in Burma–India during World War II (Sect. 9.3) and Japanese encephalitis and Korean haemorrhagic fever in the UN Command during the Korean War (Sect. 9.4). We then turn to the wartime re-emergence of classical diseases, illustrating the theme with reference to US troops (malaria) and Vietnamese civilians (human plague) during the Vietnam War (Sect. 9.5). The chapter is concluded in Section 9.6.


Author(s):  
Karl-Axel Norberg ◽  
Bo Brismar

In war a large number of military and civilian wounded and injured patients, and patients with disease, will increase the strain on the system of medical care. The expected distribution of injured in a conventional war can be estimated on the basis of previous war experiences, especially from World War II (1), the Korean war (5), the Vietnam war (7, 8), and the Arab-Israel wars (3). Corresponding figures for the civilian population are less readily accessible. Statistical data from previous wars as well as expected weapon development can be compared with data from various peacetime accidents and disasters. Thus, the expected distribution of injuries can be estimated (Table 1) (7).


Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.


Author(s):  
George W. Breslauer

In Korea, the USSR occupied the northern half of the country after Japan withdrew its occupation forces. The Soviets installed a regime of North Korean communists who enjoyed popular support due to their sacrifices in fighting the Japanese during World War II. The leadership convinced Moscow and Beijing to sanction and support an invasion of South Korea that they hoped would reunify the country. This led to the Korean War, which merely restored the status quo ante at the expense of millions of lives. The pathway was different in Vietnam, where a guerrilla war against Japanese, then French, occupation led to the victory of the Vietnamese communist party in the North.


Author(s):  
Crystal Mun-hye Baik

Korean immigration to the United States has been shaped by multiple factors, including militarization, colonialism, and war. While Koreans migrated to the American-occupied islands of Hawai’i in the early 20th century as sugar plantation laborers, Japanese imperial rule (1910–1945) and racially exclusive immigration policy curtailed Korean migration to the United States until the end of World War II. Since then, Korean immigration has been shaped by racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions related to the Korean War and American military occupation. Although existing social science literature dominantly frames Korean immigration through the paradigm of migration “waves,” these periodizations are arbitrary to the degree that they centralize perceived US policy changes or “breaks” within a linear historical timeline. In contrast, emphasizing the continuing role of peninsular instability and militarized division points to the accumulative effects of the Korean War that continue to impact Korean immigration. With the beginning of the American military occupation of Korea in 1945 and warfare erupting in 1950, Koreans experienced familial separations and displacements. Following the signing of the Korean armistice in 1953, which halted armed fighting without formally ending the war, the American military remained in the southern half of the Peninsula. The presence of the US military in South Korea had immediate repercussions among civilians, as American occupation engendered sexual intimacies between Korean women and US soldiers. Eventually, a multiracial population emerged as children were born to Korean women and American soldiers. Given the racial exclusivity of American immigration policy at the time, the US government established legislative “loopholes” to facilitate the migrations of Korean spouses of US soldiers and multiracial children adopted by American families. Between 1951 and 1964 over 90 percent of the 14,027 Koreans who entered the United States were Korean “war brides” and transnational adoptees. Since 1965, Korean spouses of American servicemen have played key roles in supporting the migration of family members through visa sponsorship. Legal provisions that affected the arrivals of Korean women and children to the United States provided a precedent for US immigration reform after 1950. For instance, the 1952 and 1965 Immigration and Nationality Acts integrated core elements of these emergency orders, including privileging heterosexual relationships within immigration preferences. Simultaneously, while the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act “opened” the doors of American immigration to millions of people, South Korean military dictatorial rule and the imminent threat of rekindled warfare also influenced Korean emigration. As a result, official US immigration categories do not necessarily capture the complex conditions informing Koreans’ decisions to migrate to the United States. Finally, in light of the national surge of anti-immigrant sentiments that have crystallized since the American presidential election of Donald Trump in November 2016, immigration rights advocates have highlighted the need to address the prevalence of undocumented immigrant status among Korean Americans. While definitive statistics do not exist, emergent data suggests that at least 10 percent of the Korean American population is undocumented. Given this significant number, the undocumented status of Korean Americans is a critical site of study that warrants further research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 476-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam R. Seipp

AbstractThis article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.


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