Mr. Webb's GI Bill

THE SERVICEMEN'S Readjust- ment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill, sent 7.8 million World War II veterans to college or vocational school--an astounding infusion of human capital into U.S. society that helped ensure national prosperity for decades. American veterans of the wars in Korea and Vietnam also received generous benefits. Then came the all-volunteer military and an excuse for GI Bill parsimony: Benefits to younger veterans starkly declined. Then Virginia elected Jim Webb to the U.S. Senate.

Sen. Webb's "New GI Bill," which went into effect Aug. 1, returns a full measure of educational aid to Americans who've served since 9/11, when falling towers and a flaming Pentagon signaled the start of a long war against a new set of lethal enemies. The fierce fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan--between them, the wars have killed more than 5,000 Americans and wounded perhaps 10 times that number--justifies a robust GI Bill, especially since, as Mr. Webb last year told Free Lance-Star readers, "Seventy percent of the Marine Corps and 75 percent of the Army leave at or before the end of their first enlistment, so the all-volunteer military is not an all-career military. When the overwhelming majority are leaving at the end of one enlistment, you still have a citizen-soldier, and those are the people who have not been taken care of."

That's the case no more. Under the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, as it's formally known, a veteran with 36 months of service can attend for four years, tuition-free, any public college or university. A monthly housing stipend (i.e., "room and board") can reach $2,700, and a vet can receive $1,000 per year to buy books. The dollar value of the public-college benefit can be applied to private institutions, many of which will supply further aid that the government will then match. Of the miscellaneous other benefits of the New GI Bill, the major one--pushed by then-President George W. Bush--allows service members who put in at least 10 years to transfer their benefits to a spouse or child.

The common wisdom is that a freshman senator can't accomplish anything important. Mr. Webb did. The very day he was sworn in (Jan. 5, 2007), he introduced his re-sinewed GI Bill and saw Mr. Bush sign it into law a year and a half later. On Capitol Hill, that is warp speed. George Allen, whom Mr. Webb defeated, served six years in the Senate. Maybe if the hawkish Mr. Allen had done something like this, rather than ridicule South Asian ethnicity and tar Mr. Webb's fine Vietnam War novels as pornography, he might still be serving. Also, another Virginia Democrat, Rep. Bobby Scott of Newport News, introduced companion GI Bill House legislation. Why did it take the Party of the Left to create this example of applied patriotism?

Just under 2 million Americans have deployed to fight the nation's wars since Sept. 11, 2001. Most of the rest of us have sacrificed nothing. The New GI Bill represents a small payment on a great national debt.

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