AFRH and The Department of Veterans Affairs
“When the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, it is estimated America had 80,000 Veterans from previous conflicts, who were treated at a handful of Veterans homes scattered across the nation. The Civil War added more than 1.9 million Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines to the rolls.” The U.S. Soldiers Home and the Philadelphia Naval Home were completely inadequate to this challenge: thus the “National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers,” a system of eleven homes with attached hospitals that were build across the country between 1865 and 1930. These institutions, the foundation of the Dept of Veterans Affairs, today have the mission of “hospitalization and rehabilitation and return, as soon as possible, of veterans to civilian life….” The Department of Veterans Affairs provides representatives to sit on the “Armed Forces Home Trust Fund.” Otherwise, the Armed Forces Retirement Home, an agency of the Dept of Defense, has no connection whatever to the VA, beyond the historical one, and is today primarily a retirement home.
Read more about this topic: Armed Forces Retirement Home
Famous quotes containing the words department, veterans and/or affairs:
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[Veterans] feel disappointed, not about the 1914-1918 war but about this war. They liked that war, it was a nice war, a real war a regular war, a commenced war and an ended war. It was a war, and veterans like a war to be a war. They do.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A prætor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)