Am I a real Veteran if I never deployed?

Two Veterans meet. Branch comes first. Job comes second. The third question arrives inside five minutes, and it is meant as small talk.

Where’d you deploy?

If you have an answer, the conversation moves on. If you don’t, you get about one second to decide how to say it. Most people go with a joke, because the joke is faster than the truth and nobody asks a follow-up.

JMach, a Marine Corps Veteran, combat engineer and host of JMach Podcast, has the joke down. Somebody at the table was telling a story and the host joked that it should have ended in gunfire. JMach cut in:

“No, we’re still in the States. I never left. Remember?”

Hear it at 21:03

He did four years. He trained on explosives and on finding them, and he says he is thankful he never had to do it for real. Then, a couple of minutes later, with no drumroll, he said the part under the joke.

“For a long time though, I used to struggle with not seeing combat or getting deployed like that and getting out of the Marine Corps. I felt like I was a failure.”

Hear it at 6:30

That is the question you typed. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, eleven Veterans and one Marine who was still serving came at it from every side: the ones who never went, the ones who went and barely left the base, and the ones who came home with a Purple Heart and still found somebody to feel smaller than.

You signed up to go

Nobody feels like a fraud about a thing they never wanted. This one stings because a lot of people joined specifically to go, and then the calendar had other plans.

Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran and mortarman with 1/6 who now makes military comedy, was in high school when a Marine he knew of was killed in action, and he says that settled it. He served from 2015 to 2019. He stops his own interview to make sure nobody gets the wrong idea.

“I’m not a combat Marine. I didn’t go to Afghanistan. I didn’t go to Iraq.”

Hear it at 25:06

His seniors came back from Afghanistan as he arrived. There was talk of going back. Instead he did a float and seven months in Norway. He does own a Combat Action Ribbon, and he will tell you exactly how: a blanket award after a missile was fired at his ship off the coast of Yemen. He says he was asleep in his rack, and that it doesn’t count. You sign up, he says, you get to the fleet, and “then you don’t even get to go do what you signed up for.”

Hear it at 27:15

“I can’t say it’s a regret because there’s nothing I could have done.”

Hear it at 27:26

Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, grew up in Las Vegas and enlisted to get out of it. His recruiter put him in a Reserve unit back in Las Vegas, with a promise that the unit was about to leave for Iraq. He finished machine gun school and reported in.

“I’m like, ‘We’re going to Iraq, right?’ And they go, ‘They started their work up in November. You’re not going to Iraq, dog.’”

Hear it at 15:12

He asked to go active. He says they told him no. He wrote to his senator, which went about as well as you would expect for a private first class.

Daniel Coffeen, a U.S. Army Veteran, Ranger School graduate and Medical Service Corps officer, was asked whether he deployed with his infantry unit. One word: nope. Then the reason that word costs him something.

“I was on fire for winning America’s land battles.”

Hear it at 28:06

It was mostly timing

Here is the part the guilt leaves out. When Pew Research Center surveyed Veterans in 2019, roughly three-quarters of those who served after 9/11 said they had deployed at least once. Among Veterans who served before, it was 58 percent. Flip those numbers over. About one in four from the busiest era in modern memory never deployed, and about four in ten from the years before.

Who went was decided by a unit’s rotation, a billet, a recruiter’s quota or a date on a contract. Randall Parkes, a Marine Corps Veteran, drill instructor and founding MARSOC Raider, is nobody’s idea of a man who missed the war. Look at when he got there.

“I was in boot camp during September 11th. And then I didn’t deploy until ‘05.”

Hear it at 15:46

Four years of a shooting war went by before his number came up. Then it came up three times in a row. If he had signed a four-year contract and gone home, he would be reading this article instead of appearing in it.

SSgt Nicholas Milsap was an active duty Marine Corps recruiter when we interviewed him, so he is not a Veteran yet, but he sees the whole board:

“I know people that have been in 12, 14 years and never deployed. They’ve never seen anything besides Japan.”

Hear it at 36:44

His own first deployment, he says, was random.

Somebody loaded the bomb

Then there is everybody whose job was to make the deployment possible for someone else. Jo MT, a 20 year Air Force bomb loader and stand-up comedian, has no confusion about what his part was.

“For me, I was never in Afghanistan. It was always my bird that I sent in.”

Hear it at 7:56

Lock and load, he says, send it down range. He does not sound like a man asking permission to count.

Going does not settle it either. Nate Rosas, a U.S. Army Veteran who went to Afghanistan in 2009, says he had friends with really rough deployments while he was “definitely what was known as a Fobbit. I didn’t leave very often.”

Hear it at 10:15

And Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy Veteran, actress and firefighter EMT, worked logistics. When the host brought up her Veteran status she announced, deadpan, that she was stolen valor and was waiting for everyone to find out. Then she ruined her own bit with logic.

“I would say I did something cooler than logistics if I was stolen valor.”

Hear it at 6:45

Some people will give you grief

We are not going to tell you the judgment is all in your head. It isn’t.

Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, told us about a student who maintained jets at Nellis and became the first woman to lead the campus student Veteran chapter. Other Veterans leaned on her, he says, and not because she was a woman.

“They gave her crap because she didn’t deploy.”

Hear it at 1:19:18

She went on to organize the chapter’s first memorial march across Nevada for the state’s fallen. The people who gave her crap are not named in the story. That seems about right.

Marshall met the ranking system in VA support groups, where what she carried came from a sexual assault, not from a firefight.

“No shade against the combat bros, but the ones who go, ‘Oh, you have PTSD from being sexually assaulted. That’s like not the same at all. Like my PTSD is worse.’”

Hear it at 30:10

Her answer to them was that this is not a contest, said in fewer and better words than we can print here.

It runs all the way up

Now the part nobody who never deployed gets told. The people you are measuring yourself against are doing the same math, against someone else.

Dean Goble Jr., a retired Army Green Beret and Black Rifle Coffee philanthropy director, is about as far up the ladder as the ladder goes. He was describing an event that honors World War II and Korean War Veterans, and this was said at the table in that interview:

“You hear some of their stories and you’re just like, I didn’t do anything.”

Hear it at 36:10

A minute later Goble was explaining why he wants to do more for police and firefighters in cities like Chicago.

“They’ve seen more combat than I ever did.”

Hear it at 36:53

A Green Beret said that. About firefighters.

Alfred Brenner, a Purple Heart recipient, retired USMC K9 handler and author, was wounded by an IED. He woke up in a hospital bed, on tubes, watching other wounded troops who could at least walk.

“As soon as I open my eyes I started comparing myself.”

Hear it at 36:05

He was angry at them. Then someone told him about the Marine in the next bed.

“My life was flipped upside down when they told me the kid next to me was almost gonna die because he was a triple amputee.”

Hear it at 36:39

So the scale has no top. The Fobbit looks at the grunt, the grunt looks at the Green Beret, the Green Beret looks at a man who landed in 1944, and a wounded Marine looks at the next bed over. If the comparison never ends for them, it was never going to end for you. AJ Kehl describes the same arithmetic about his disability rating in What did your disability rating change?.

So do you count?

We are not the office that decides that, and we are not going to rule on anybody’s paperwork. What we can do is point at the law. The federal definition VA works from, 38 U.S.C. 101, turns on having served in the active military, naval, air or space service and on how you were discharged. The word “deployed” is not in it. VA’s health care eligibility page has rules about length of service and separate rules for Guard and Reserve members, and combat shows up only as something that can move you up a priority list. Your own case is your own case, which is what a Veterans Service Officer is for.

The other half of the question is not legal, and our guests split on it.

JMach heard every reassurance available and none of it worked from the outside.

“It took me a long time to get over that too. You could say that to me all you want.”

Hear it at 7:39

What moved him was deciding what the four years were for.

“My calling of joining the Marine Corps wasn’t to fight the war overseas, but to fight the war we face once we get back home.”

Hear it at 7:49

He also reports, with real surprise, meeting Veterans from other jobs and branches who do not carry this at all. He asked them whether it bothered them. They told him, “I never wanted that experience.”

Hear it at 29:19

It had not occurred to him that a person could think that way. It is allowed.

D’Angelo answers the question differently. He grew up rough, and when people ask him the usual thing he says:

“People are always like, ‘Oh, did you go into combat in the Marine Corps?’ It’s like, no, I was in combat before I joined the Marine Corps.”

Hear it at 23:30

And Brenner, who has the answer everyone else thinks they want, was talking about what Veterans miss. He put it in the service itself, “even if you didn’t deploy.” What he named was “that camaraderie, the brotherhood.”

Hear it at 49:43

The Marine with the Purple Heart did not check anybody’s ribbons before he said it.