What Is a Combat Veteran?

Ask ten agencies to define a “combat veteran,” and you’ll get twelve answers. Ask ten combat veterans, and you’ll get one feeling: that nobody ever asked them to define it themselves.

For all the medals, speeches, and programs built around military service, the phrase “combat veteran” remains legally undefined. It appears on license plates, nonprofit banners, and campaign ads, but not in any section of Title 38 of the U.S. Code.

That absence is the reason policymakers lump every veteran experience together, the reason benefits are generalized, and the reason the public still doesn’t understand what separates deployment from combat.

The Bureaucracy Measures Combat by Paperwork

The Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of War rely on proxies: combat pay, campaign medals, or assignment to a “designated combat zone.” Those markers are tidy but imprecise.

By that logic, an airman in Qatar and an infantryman in Kunar both qualify the same, and a

medic who treated burn victims outside a declared combat zone does not. Combat becomes a matter of zip code, not exposure.

When the government defines combat by geography instead of experience, it mistakes location for risk and paperwork for pain.

Combat Is an Experience, Not a Coordinate

Combat isn’t limited to those who fired a weapon. It includes anyone who faced direct or imminent threat from armed conflict, whether they carried a rifle, flew a drone, drove a convoy, or patched the wounded under fire.

Psychologists call the unseen aftermath of those experiences moral injury. This is the internal conflict that arises when war collides with conscience. Studies from the VA National Center for PTSD and experts like Dr. Jonathan Shay show that moral injury can outlast trauma itself.

This is why Combat Veterans of America defines combat not by awards, but by exposure to danger, death, and decisions no human being should have to make. Combat begins where safety ends.

The Cost of Not Defining It

When the government doesn’t distinguish between combat and non-combat veterans, policy flattens need. Programs like disability compensation, mental-health outreach, and employment support treat every veteran identically, even though combat exposure multiplies every risk factor: PTSD, unemployment, suicide, and divorce.

If Congress cannot define “combat veteran,” it cannot legislate for them. The result is a benefits system that treats the wounds of war like paperwork errors — measurable only by percentages, not by proximity to hell.

CVA’s Definition

Combat Veterans of America defines a combat veteran as:

Any individual who, through direct action, proximity, or operational function, experienced personal exposure to hostile or life-threatening conditions arising from armed conflict — whether through direct engagement, sustained threat, or immediate support of those who fought.

This definition recognizes every form of exposure, from the rifleman on patrol to the corpsman on the medevac line to the drone operator who witnessed violence through a screen. It restores humanity to a label that bureaucracy has stripped of meaning.

Why It Matters

Words shape law, and law shapes lives. Without a clear definition, “combat veteran” becomes a political slogan instead of a protected status.

A precise definition gives weight to policy: it tells lawmakers who they are responsible for, ensures benefits reflect actual exposure, and restores the dignity of specificity.

CVA’s mission is to give that language back to veterans. To ensure that “combat veteran” once again describes those who stood between war and the rest of the nation, and lived with what that means. If America cannot define its combat veterans, it cannot claim to understand its wars. Combat Veterans of America exists to fix that, not by rewriting history, but by restoring clarity, accountability, and truth to the people who lived it.

Brandon Michael Barron, J.D. is the Founder and National Commander of Combat Veterans of America (CVA), a national 501(c)(19) organization committed to modernizing how veterans serve and lead after service. A U.S. Army National Guard veteran, Barron writes on veterans’ disability & leadership.

The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official positions or policies of Combat Veterans of America.