ABSTRACT
Research on military service has a long and rich history. Indeed, the roots of quantitative Sociology can be traced to research sponsored by the military during World War II. The American Soldier (Stouffer et al. 1949a,b) represents a watershed in empirical Sociology that continues to shape social scientific thought today (Williams 1989, 2006). Methodological innovations, such as Guttman scaling, and theoretical foundations, such as relative deprivation, trace their heritage to The American Soldier. Subsequent research has continued to document the important role that the military plays in national and international relations, as well being a laboratory to study professional and occupational structures (Siebold 2001). Yet despite this research heritage, fifty years after the publication of The American Soldier, we know surprisingly little about the ways that military service is linked to the lives of the men and women who have served their country.
