It is Veteran’s Day in the US, and I thought we should look at the distribution of veterans across the country and North Dakota. To do this I grabbed some data from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. It includes both actual and projected veteran population data. First a look at the US as a whole.

The geographic concentrations here surprised me some. Lots of veterans locating in the southwest of the country. There are a significant number of veterans along the East coast, but more evenly distributed without lots of major clusters within counties. I was a bit surprised at the lighter shade running up the center of the country, especially when you consider that many of these states have sizable populations overall. Part of the surprise may be due to the veterans I know and where I lived in my lifetime. I spent a good deal of time in New England and most of the veterans I know from that area stayed in that area, which is somewhat displayed in the map.

Then I turned my attention to North Dakota. The results there are a bit less surprising as far as the geographic distribution.

The veterans population certainly seems roughly concentrated around the four major population centers or the routes between them. That’s a rough rule, not an absolute. Notice that no county in North Dakota has zero veterans and that the lower bound on veterans in the four large counties represents a sizable percentage.

I’ve lots of veterans in my family and so I send out a great big thank you to them and all the veterans for their service.

This work by Flynnglis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International