Coming Home: Attitudes toward U.S. Veterans Returning from Iraq Alair MacLean, Washington State University, Vancouver Meredith Kleykamp, University of Maryland In this article, we investigate public attitudes toward combat veterans returning from Iraq. Using data from a nationally representative survey that incorporates an experimental design, we assess the extent to which attitudes toward military veterans and private contractors differ, and whether public attitudes toward men vary based on com- bat and war zone experience. Drawing on social psychology and military sociology, we test hypotheses derived from a conceptual model of stigma and from research on the cultural injunction to “support the troops.” Consistent with the first portion of the stigma model, members of the public are not surprised to learn that men who went to a war zone behave according to stereotypes that imply that such men have problems with mental health, substance abuse, and violent behavior. Yet they do not discriminate against these men. Instead they favor men who went to Iraq compared to those who stayed in the United States. They also favor veterans compared to contractors. While combat veterans may be stereotyped, they are not stigmatized. They benefit from symbolic capital, which outweighs the effect of stereotypes on discrimination. Keywords: military service; social inequality; stigma; symbolic capital; veterans. Previous scholars have evaluated whether and how people who are mentally ill, particularly those with violent tendencies, face stigma. According to this work, members of the public hold stereotypes about the mentally ill and discriminate against them (Link et al. 1987; Pescosolido et al. 2010). Yet, in certain cases, they hold stereotypes about how others will behave, but are less likely than expected to discriminate (Corrigan et al. 2003; Link et al. 1999). They may hold unex- pectedly positive views about those they believe are mentally ill because they believe the illness is externally caused or about those who hold relatively greater power or capital (Link and Phelan 2001). Recent research has suggested that veterans returning from the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan are disproportionately likely to have poor psychological health, experiencing symptoms, for example, of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression (Hoge et al. 2004; Tanielian and Jaycox 2008). U.S. troops have been at war for much of the last decade, yet we still have little knowledge of how members of the public perceive these wartime veter- ans. In 2010, young veterans of this era were struggling to find jobs in the U.S. labor market; the unemployment rate among 18- to 24-year-old veterans stood at 20.9 percent, while only 17.3 percent of comparable nonveterans were unemployed (Hefling 2011). Some observers have explicitly and implicitly argued that these veterans have trouble finding jobs at least part- ly due to stigma. According to this argument proposed by some policymakers and veterans’ advocates, employers are reluctant to hire recent veterans, assuming that such veterans have An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 meetings of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, GA. The authors are grateful to Jeremy Freese, Crosby Hipes, Robert Hughes, Monica Johnson, Jeff Lucas, Devah Pager, and Jake Rosenfeld for input on earlier versions of this article. This research was partially funded by research grants from the National Institute on Aging (R03 AG 029275) and the National Science Foundation (1048439). Data collected by the Time- Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), NSF Grant 0818839, Jeremy Freese and Penny Visser, Principal Investi- gators. Direct correspondence to: Alair MacLean, Washington State University, Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave., Vancouver, WA 98686. E-mail: alair.maclean@wsu.edu. Social Problems, Vol. 61, Issue 1, pp. 131–154, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. © 2014 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/sp.2013.12074.