Veteran Status, Race-Ethnicity, and Marriage Among Fragile Families We used data from the Fragile Families and

the impact of men’s past military service on the likelihood that a couple will marry within 5 years of a nonmarital birth. Logistic regression analyses showed that men’s past military service increased marriage odds by 54 % for couples with Black fathers even after controlling for potential mediators. But veteran status had no effect on couples with White or Hispanic fathers. As a result, the large Black-White gap in postbirth marriage evident among couples with civilian fathers did not exist among couples with veteran fathers. Our findings bolster other evidence that military service exerts lasting and unique pro-marriage effects on Blacks. The ‘‘retreat from marriage’ ’ has inspired sev-eral decades of research regarding the causes and consequences of declines in marriage and related increases in nonmarital childbearing. This literature has focused on marriage within overlapping urban, low-income, and minority populations and has paid particular attention to African Americans, among whom the retreat from marriage has been greatest (Edin, 2000