This is the story of veterans coming home from wars throughout the history of the United States, and their expectations, hopes, and dreams of a better life. The author chronicles the struggles to realise all of those expectations by tracing the experiences of American veterans from the Revolutionary War to the current conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. It connects pieces of a larger story that has traditionally been told only in individual parts. This book delves into personal memoirs, diaries, and interviews to link veterans' hopes for the future with how their dreams were fulfilled, or how they died. It shows how war changed them, how they lived with their experiences despite the odds, and how alone they can be. Accompanying photographs relate other stories written on their gallant faces. Each chapter begins with a battlefield vignette designed to provide background to a given conflict, which is followed by the situation and reception veterans faced when they returned home. In each instance between 1865 and 2005, the federal government developed numerous programmes to assist veterans as they made the transition from combat to civilian life. Among the issues explored are social readjustment and acceptance; training, placement, and hiring preferences; medical care and disability compensation; education; retirement and burial. The work also examines to what extent treatment of women and minority veterans has differed, as well as to what extent veterans' issues have affected women and minorities in U.S. society. The chapters are followed by appendices that list veterans, programmes and organisations, and a bibliography.