In this article, I describe the life-sustaining but inherently coercive labor of care in a veteran treatment court (VTC), a "helping court" in which veterans charged with less-severe offenses can avoid jail by completing a 12- to 18-month therapeutic and rehabilitative program. This privileged medico-legal status is intertwined with the moral economy of military service in the contemporary US and resonates with the politics of American war-making. I argue that the caring work of the court helps produce the subject of , simultaneously enabling life-sustaining practices and constraining the forms of life that veteran offenders can inhabit.