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:
““Which is more important to you, your field or your children?” the department head asked. She replied, “That’s like asking me if I could walk better if you amputated my right leg or my left leg.””
—Anonymous Parent. As quoted in Women and the Work Family Dilemma, by Deborah J. Swiss and Judith P. Walker, ch. 2 (1993)
“[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)
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)