In Hopewell Township, N.J., the veterans of American Legion Post 339 have put their building up for sale. "Today's vets don't come out," 82-year old Jim Hall told The Times of Trenton last month. The post is down from 425 paying members in the 1960s and '70s to 202 this year; only about a dozen regularly attend.
But it's America that has changed, not vets.
Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by about 50 percent, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50 percent, from 3 million to 1.4 million. A far smaller percentage of the citizenry now serves in the military.
Whereas in 1969 13 percent of Americans were veterans, in 2007 only 8 percent of us were.
Even more important than these general demographic shifts is the change wrought by the end of the draft in 1973. Until then, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true. The residential patterns for current veterans and the patterns of state-level contributions of new recruits to the all-volunteer military have a distinct geographic tilt. And tellingly, the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/14/AR2008121401815.htmlIMO, the army is the only job available for Red Staters. The real jobs were shipped off to China.