For most observers, veterans' power was first demonstrated in their violent protests and subsequent extraction of lump-sum payments and monthly war service pensions in 1997. Asked to pay additional taxes to fund the veterans' new benefits, workers protested, with the tacit support of white private sector employers. Both workers and white employers became targets of an allegedly new alliance between veterans and the party. This emerging conventional wisdom is wrong. First, this study demonstrates that veterans' power and their collaboration with the ruling party dates back to 1980. Second, my ongoing study of the politics of veterans' pensions shows that veterans exercised considerable power to win further benefits from an existing pensions program (war disability pensions), to be included in another (official heroes' pensions), and to introduce new pensions from 1980 to the present. Significantly, war service pensions were a major concern for guerrilla veterans from independence and their power was demonstrated when the government recognized war service years when calculating the retirement pensions of guerrilla veterans in the army in 1989 and, soon after, in the civil service. The politics of veterans' pensions displays the same dynamic that I have shown characterized the relationship between veterans and the ruling party in the context of working out the legacies of the peace settlement: often simultaneous conflict and collaboration as party and veterans manipulate each other, using violence and intimidation and a war discourse, to advance their respective agendas.