Nearly one-fourth of all veterans live in rural areas

While the 2010 census found that only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas, 24 percent of all veterans do, says a report by the U.S. Census Bureau, using data from 2011-15. An even greater percentage of military members come from rural areas.

Of the veterans who live in rural areas, 45.9 percent live in the South, 26.4 percent in the Midwest, 14.1 percent in the West and 13.7 percent in the Northeast. Slicing the data another way, veterans are most likely to be rural if they live in the Midwest and least likely in the West. (Census graphic: Percentage of veterans by region)

More than 60 percent of veterans in Maine and Vermont, the two most rural states by population, live in rural areas. Following those states with the highest percentage of rural veterans are West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Montana, South Dakota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Alabama, Kentucky, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Carolina.

Though the disability rate increases with age, compared with urban veterans, rural veterans have higher disability rates across all age ranges. Rural veterans are also slightly older. Their average age was 65 years, compared with 63 years for urban veterans. Among military eras, Vietnam Era veterans were the most rural (27.8 percent), followed by peacetime (25.2), Korean War (23.9), the first Gulf War (21.9), World War II (18.7) and the second Gulf War (17.7).

Many veterans have health problems. While the uninsured rates are comparable for rural and urban veterans 65 and older, the younger the veteran, the less likely he or she is to have health insurance. President Trump's repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could leave more veterans without health insurance, which means the Department of Veteran Affairs may have to pick up the slack, says a report from NPR.

Among veterans 45 to 64, 8.6 percent of rural vets are uninsured, compared to 7.4 percent for urban veterans, for ages 26 to 44, 13 percent of rural veterans are uninsured, compared to 11 percent of urban veterans, and for ages 18 to 25, 21.6 percent of rural veterans are uninsured, compared to 15.5 percent of urban veterans.

Early antiwar activist dies in obscurity, and the national paper of record runs an obit 7 years later

Don Duncan made this liberal magazine's cover.

The obituary in The Madison Courier in Southern Indiana about a 79-year-old man who had died in a local nursing home was nothing special, other than noting his sister (actually a stepsister) was Mitzi Gaynor, not otherwise identified. It also did not mention that he had returned from a tour as a Green Beret sergeant in Vietnam and quit the Army to become "one of the war's fiercest critics, well before the antiwar movement had gathered steam," reports William McDonald of The New York Times.

McDonald is the Times obituary editor. His story ran last week. The obituary of Donald W. Duncan had appeared in 2009, unbeknownst to the Times, which a few years later started to prepare an obit on him because he "made an appreciable impact on the national discussion of the war," McDonald wrote.

When the Times discovered that Duncan's death had been reported, it had a decision to make. "If another news organization, particularly one with national reach, had run an obituary in 2009, we would have stood down, acknowledging that we had been napping back then and that it was way too late now to make up for the lapse," McDonald wrote. "A competitive daily newspaper isn’t keen on reporting something that happened seven years ago. Unless, of course, virtually no one else had reported it. We decided to pursue the obituary, the seven years notwithstanding. The thinking was, we would have written about Mr. Duncan immediately after he died had we known, so we should apply the same standard now. His death, in a sense, was still news, and his story still deserved to be told. What’s more, in an odd way, the very obscurity of his death added an unexpected, even poignant, element."

The Times obit by Robert McFadden said Duncan "died in the obscurity of a small Midwestern town seven years ago, an all-but-forgotten soldier. He was 79. In an age of seeming information ubiquity, the news media will generally recall the lives of noteworthy people when they die. But Mr. Duncan’s death went largely unnoticed outside of Madison, Ind., the Ohio River town where he lived."