Overwhelmingly supported in the Legislature during the recently concluded 2015 session, House Bill 1179, signed into law by the Republican governor on March 13, changed the status of the title \u201cveteran\u201d to include military reserve or National Guard members, which means those individuals can qualify for additional benefits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A number of combat veterans in the state have spoken out against the bill, arguing that the measure means war veterans will get less of the benefit pie and that it waters down the meaning of the title.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes things more difficult for legit combat veterans,\u201d said Ted Fowler, a Vietnam War veteran from Aberdeen who served in the U.S. Army. \u201cIf this were high school, what they\u2019d be doing is passing out letterman jackets to junior varsity players who have never seen any varsity action. Those folks haven\u2019t earned the title.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As the author of the article at WZ, Dapandico, notes, in the picture at the link, there are at least two guardsmen with combat patches and there are career active duty soldiers walking around today who haven’t deployed, some who actively avoided deployments to the war on terror. While I understand Mr Fowler’s concerns, things have changed since Vietnam. The reserve side of the house has been pulling their weight over the last twenty years or so. <\/p>\n
TSO was a guardsman, yet he has deployments to the Balkans and to Afghanistan. The Guard and Reserve isn’t the weekend keg party that it was in the past. In fact, the Pentagon plans to use the reserves to cover deployments as they draw down the active force.<\/p>\n
I’d remind Mister Fowler, the Vietnam veteran quoted above that there are ninety-nine Guardsman who are named on the Vietnam Memorial. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to our friends at Weaselzippers, in a link sent by MustangCryppie, the State of South … South Dakota redefines “veteran”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59226,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[208,206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-guard","category-reserve-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/59226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"SD-Gov\"](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/SD-Gov-300x215.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n