dollar-a-year men

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

no, i'm not offering this as a novel expression, or tryting to
antedate it.  just an observation that it might not be understood by
today's readers.  here's George Packer in The New Yorker, 7/4/05, p. 52:

-----
The home front of the first two years of the Iraq war was not like
that of the Second World War, and it was not like that of Vietnam...
There were no war bonds, no collection  drives, no universal call-up,
no national mobilization, no dollar-a-year men.
-----

the rest of the allusions could be figured out from context, or
involve semantically compositional combinations, but i'm not entirely
sure about "dollar-a-year men".

arnold