Post-9/11—and indeed all twenty-first-century—military veterans owe a debt of gratitude that they increasingly cannot pay to their “Greatest Generation” forebearers. Nearly every day now, the Socials announce the passing of yet another of the last survivors of a particular battle or campaign or front of WWII, from 102-year-old D-Day survivor turned TikTok star “Papa Jake” Larson on August 25, 2025, to 102-year-old “Real Life Rosie the Riveter” Marie West on January 25, 2026. For the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 8, 2025, zero Pearl Harbor survivors were present at the site’s remembrance ceremony on Oahu, 84 years after those days’ monument events.

　　Despite how some social media imbibers might have digested that fact, there was no “diss” involved toward current Department of War policies or personnel. Rather, the survivors’ absence was confirmation of a sad reality: Only twelve American Pearl Harbor veterans currently remain alive. And they are in fragile health.

　　Estimates by the US Census Bureau and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) calculate that out of the original 16.4 million Americans who served in uniform during WWII, fewer than 45,418 remain alive today. That’s less than 0.5 percent of the “Greatest Generation.” As recently as 2015, there were still around one million of that cohort alive; by 2023, the number had dwindled to less than 66,143. The daily decline in numbers is no less stark: around 131 WWII veterans are passing away each day. VA estimates that within ten years, fewer than 300 total will remain. Already, Alaska has zero remaining WWII veterans living there, with several other states soon to follow in such footsteps.

　　When the last WWII veteran takes his or her breath, that cataclysmic war itself will cease to be a living memory. It will become documented history, just as WWI did upon the death of the 110-year-old US Army veteran Frank Buckles in 2011, then the last surviving of all WWI veterans.

　　Society as a whole, both civilian and military, owes each its own and its combined gratitude to those who fought and sacrificed in WWII. This is no revolutionary insight, of course; it’s almost a cliched pronouncement at this point. But what is neither cliched nor obvious is that all those who served in the US Armed Forces today and over the course of the past 25 years of the Global War on Terror are particularly indebted to this earlier cohort for the public’s awareness of veterans simply.

　　Just as World War I gave new impetus to the study of human aptitudes via the research and application of the emerging field of psychology, so World War II gave new impetus to the study of human attitudes via the emerging field of sociology. The latter was showcased in the rather epic collection of studies initiated exactly one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and organized by Samuel A. Stouffer and his peers at the Research Branch of the (US) War Department’s Information and Education Division. Over the course of the war, these originally academic researchers would collect data from over half a million men, employing some 200 questionnaires, many with over 100 items each. Once declassified, the massive undertaking resulted in the publication, in 1949, of the four-part series Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, which came to be known more popularly as The American Soldier.

　　Veterans could no longer just be our grandfathers or maybe uncles—members of prior generations clothed with shadows and myths heroic or violent. Veterans were suddenly young—and us.

　　The American Soldier project initially had three primary audiences according to Stouffer: the Armed Forces, historians, and social psychologists and sociologists. Directly influencing the American public was not then front of mind. But any endeavor meant to help shape an institution encompassing 16 million souls will eventually bleed into the larger population in tangible and intangible ways. The findings both during the war and immediately afterward had pragmatic results, including improving soldiers’ retention and comprehension of information imparted by the Army; creating the troop demobilization point system or Advanced Service Rating Score; the GI Bill; and importantly, even the eventual desegregation of the US military.

　　Within the US Army, various summaries of some of the earliest studies were published in graphic form in a military publication for unit commanders (“those performing command and leadership functions”) called What the Soldier Thinks. This “digest, with charts,” was meant to show those in leadership positions what the “attitudes, prejudices, and desires” of American troops during the war were. Then Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall thought these insights so valuable, he ordered a monthly version to be distributed to officers throughout the Army so that they could be implemented in the field in real time.

　　With the war’s end, Stouffer aimed to make the project a more lasting contribution. He wanted to generalize, from the particular issues and insights investigated during the war, codifiable evidence about combat effectiveness, relationships among categories of Army personnel (by rank, branch of service, assignments in the field, race, and such like), the role of values and beliefs, the effectiveness of educational approaches and other substantive issues, as well as methodological developments that derived from staff and consultant efforts.

　　Continuously assessing the state of such subjects remains of profound importance to today’s military, and especially so for both military and civilian policymakers in how they understand and shape the contours of institutional success within each service branch. In fact, such studies only increased in importance once the United States turned away from a conscription model military to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973. It also remains of foundational importance to the small community of academics and researchers who remain committed to understanding the role of militaries, soldiers, veterans, and societies, as typified by the work of such leading figures of the field of military sociology—and therefore, civil-military relations—such as David R. Segal and the late Charles Moskos—once supposedly dubbed “the nation’s most influential military sociologist.”

　　All of this continues to remain more or less in the research shadows of the Pentagon or academia as far as the average American veteran, not to mention civilian, is concerned, and despite their lived lives often being shaped by that research’s findings. Yet again, in a democratic society such as ours, where citizens enter into military service and depart it back into civilian society, developments within an organization as large as the US Armed Forces have their way of bleeding into the larger civilian society.

　　One way they did it was via the ether of the 40th anniversary D-Day celebrations at Pointe de Hoc, France, attended by President Ronald Regan and NBC producer Tom Brokaw in 1984. That day resulted in Brokaw amassing the stories, experiences, and lasting generational effects of those born during the Great Depression, who grew up to fight World War II, whether in uniform or out of it. No doubt, the Cold War atmosphere where the USSR played civilizational enemy, within which those celebrations occurred in 1984, helped to amplify the positive resonances of military service for its distinguished participants.

　　Eventually published as a book in 1998, Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation popularized that now ubiquitous descriptor. That same year, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan hit cinema screens, igniting the imaginations and curiosities of a public already growing increasingly distant from and ignorant of its military—as typified at the highest levels with President Clinton’s frequently inharmonious relationship with the military. (It itself resulted in the now widely considered foundational study of postwar American civil-military relations, Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn’s Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security—a topic for another day.)

　　At the same time, Dallas financial advisor B. G. Burkett was helping to initiate what would become an influential pushback against the down-and-out, negative veteran image that had suffused our culture and media narrative since the Vietnam War. In 1998, he published his investigative book, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and its History.

　　Burkett, a Vietnam veteran himself, had long been flummoxed by the media’s frequent portrayal of specifically Vietnam veterans (and thus veterans at large) throughout the 1980s and 90s as the angry dregs of society, because it looked like pure fiction when contrasted with the reality of the lived lives of his large circle of veteran acquaintances. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he requested information and other sources. Burkett uncovered a phenomenon of fake veterans with zero military experience parading themselves before the media with purchased or outright stolen paraphernalia, along with shoddy journalism still tinged with anti-military sentiment that frequently assumed veteran status where there was none.

　　It is the Greatest Generation veterans who remind us of the nobility to be found in a distinctly American form of public, national service.

　　Burkett showed that Vietnam veterans, and thus veterans at large, did not look like their media stereotypes, but rather were immensely successful, holding down long-term jobs, with houses and children, retirement accounts, and voting records. Thanks in part to that reawakened awareness of the American public around veterans, Burkett’s efforts would later help to propel the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 forward.

　　That legislation was propelled forward by another cultural event that called forth a new generation of soldiers. In 2001, Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg released what would become an iconic HBO television series, Band of Brothers. The show reintroduced images of everyday American boys becoming honorable, sacrificing soldiers and successful, still public-minded veterans. It took the nation by storm. Its premiere date: September 9, 2001—two days before an entirely new attack on Americans on American soil, that resonated deeply in the patriotic hearts of all Americans.

　　I was an undergraduate at the University of Dallas in Texas during these years. Many of my friends and fellow students had boyfriends and family members who were newly deployed to previously unheard-of places such as Fallujah. I remember asking then: Will these people, these young adults our age, currently doing war, be veterans too? With almost every single person, the answer came back with stares of absolute blankness, and an assumption that one had to have fought in World War II or perhaps Vietnam to ever be a veteran. (Curiously, the majority of the British public continue to hold this assumption.)

　　Twenty-five years later, we have forgotten—in part due to the success of the “Thank You For Your Service” (TYFYS) Movement and the ubiquity of veteran preference moments in everything from airline boarding to sporting events to employment—just how much we didn’t talk about veterans or military service before 9/11. We’ve forgotten just how much, not just 9/11, but also a few surrounding cultural events connected with a revitalized awareness of WWII veterans, served as the catalyst to change that on a national level.

　　The “thawing” of assumptions about Vietnam War veterans, combined with those images of the Greatest Generation veterans, further combined with the images of young American soldiers returning from vicious battles in Afghanistan and then Iraq playing across our television screens, all contributed to a groundswell of nonprofits forming to aid and assist military veterans. This is the famous “Sea of Good Will” that Admiral Mullen described in 2010—referring to the then nearly 50,000 different organizations that had sprung up over the decade post-9/11 related to veterans and military families.

　　One small part of this Sea of Goodwill was philanthropists of a different nature—not millionaires with grant making foundations, but scholars and researchers and affiliated policymakers who were suddenly realizing that the preponderance of the research we had about soldiers and society and military veterans was entirely related to the conscript-era veterans of Vietnam, Korea, World War II and World War I. And that while we had massive assumptions and popular narratives about who and what our veterans were, we didn’t have much of a clue at all about veterans, in fact.

　　The new generation of post-9/11 veterans engaging with war and returning home afterward—not just here in America, but elsewhere across the home countries of our fellow coalition forces—completely changed the awareness, discussion, and narrative about veterans. Veterans could no longer just be our grandfathers or maybe uncles—members of prior generations clothed with shadows and myths heroic or violent. Veterans were suddenly young—and us.

　　While the next and future cohorts of All-Volunteer Force veterans will owe their own debt of gratitude to post-9/11 veterans, they and post-9/11 veterans, not to mention those of us who hope to study and serve them, will forever owe an incalculable debt to the Greatest Generation veterans now quietly and quickly leaving this earth. It is they who enabled us to understand that we needed to start studying veterans seriously. It is they who made us realize just how much we assumed we knew who and what veterans were and the role that they have played in American civil society over the decades. It is they who reminded us of the nobility to be found in a distinctly American form of public, national service.