While Memorial Day is a time to remember and give thanks to those who gave their lives for our country, it’s also an opportunity to thank all those who have served our country. The set of maps below show rates of veterans at the county level and Census tract level across the state.

Veterans at the county level

Below, we can see that the county with the largest rate of veterans is Liberty County, in Southeast Georgia, where nearly a quarter of the residents are veterans. It’s followed by Long County on its southern border, where a fifth of residents are veterans. Chattahoochee, Camden and Columbia counties round out the remaining top five Georgia counties for veterans.

Source: American Community Survey 2015-2019 rolling averages via DataNexus.

Veterans at the tract level

The census tract level view below brings into focus the relationship between military bases and the rates of veterans who live nearby. We can see clusters of tracts with high rates of veterans around Fort Stewart, Warner Robins, Fort Gordon, Fort Benning and the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay.

Source: American Community Survey 2015-2019 rolling averages via DataNexus.

The 10-county’s veterans

While the maps show that the state’s greatest rates of veterans live outside ARC’s 10-county area, we still have many veterans living here. The charts that follow examine the range of conflicts during which our veterans served.

Living vets

The chart below shows which war/wars the 231,761 veterans currently living in the 10-county area served in. Here, “only” refers to veterans who served in just one war. If a veteran served in, say, Korea and Vietnam, that person would fall into the category of “served in multiple wars.” The strong increase in veterans in this multiple service category is owing to the frequent overlap of service and deployment across the Gulf Wars and the Afghanistan conflict.

Source: ACS 2015-2019 rolling averages via Social Explorer, with analysis by ARC’s Research and Analytics Group

Losing generations

As time goes by, we lose our vets to any number of things. The chart below brings into stark relief how many of our World War II veterans we are losing and why it’s important to preserve memories and lived histories now. Since 2000, we lost nine out of every 10 surviving World War II-only veterans, and six out of every 10 surviving Korean War-only veterans.

Source: 2000 Census & ACS 2015-2019 rolling averages via Social Explorer, with analysis by ARC’s Research and Analytics Group