NotNormativelyHuman 289
veterans and their benefits and entitlements.^120 This debate is a useful
reminder that there is a dimension to veterans' disabilities that goes
beyond the impairments themselves: in ways charted by Nussbaum's
"capabilities approach" (discussed above), the issue at hand here is the
roleofthepublicdomaininen-ablingdisabledveteranstoliveadecent
life. That role, as also John Kinder has shown, is as yet hesitantly and
incompletely defined. Instead, possibly because of the symbolic over-
determination of veterans' disabilities, cases of disability fraud, when
veterans are falsely claiming to have received disabling impairments
during military service, are achieving special notoriety, ironically from
the political Right which routinely heaps praises on the military.I will
returntotheso-called"disabilitycon"laterinthischapter.
LeftBehind:DisabilityinVeteran(Auto)Biographies
The processes through which lives take story form have repeatedly
been the objects of discussion in the present volume. The idea is
probably as old as humankind itself, and equally old is the assumption
that lives full of adventure make for especially good stories. In U.S.
culture, it was the period following the Civil War, when soldiers who
hadsurvivedthefightingbecamepublicstorytellersandevencelebrities
of sorts. In the emerging pop culture of the nation, publications like
"Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" series ofCentury-Magazine
(1884-87) allegedly relied on veterans' memories to glorify military
heroesandthebattlefieldastestinggroundforvirileprowess.^121 Stephen
Crane'sRed Badge of Courage(1895) acknowledges and at the same
time also contests the power of such "[t]ales of great movement [with]
much glory in them" (7). Atleast in the material engaged by Crane,the
"glory"didnotincludedeadormutilatedbodies.Hiscounter-ideological
narrative emphatically did, even gesturing at forms of PTSDavant la
lettre.AllthelaterwarsfoughtbytheUnitedStates(andnotonlythere)
produced a superabundance of war stories, many of them with a
(^120) For more details cf. Finch, J. L. "GOP's Actual Track Record on Supporting
Veterans."DailyKos.KosMedia,LLC,23Oct.2013.Web.10Nov.2014.
(^121) For more on this cf. Pratt, Lyndon U. "A Possible Source ofTheRedBadge
ofCourage."AmericanLiterature11.1(1939):1-10.Print.