Senator John McCain introduced Senate Resolution 33 on February 9, 1999, and the Senate agreed to it on April 30, 1999, designating May 1999 as National Military Appreciation Month with backing from Representative Duncan Hunter and more than 50 veterans groups. A follow-up bill to write the month permanently into Title 36 was never enacted, so it now recurs through an annual presidential proclamation rather than statute.
CHAPTER 01
A senator who thought the long weekends had gone soft
By the late 1990s, John McCain had a complaint many veterans shared. The military days on the May calendar had drifted into ordinary three-day weekends, their meaning sanded down to cookouts and mattress sales. He wanted the public to look up from the grill.
His fix was not a new holiday. It was a frame around the ones already there. If May was the busiest military month on the calendar, he reasoned, then naming the whole month might pull its scattered observances back into focus.
