Veteran's preference does not mean they must necessarily hire the vet over the non vet. It just means that they are committed to giving veterans at least an equal, and sometimes a more preferential position in the interview process. Using you as "a piece of liability insurance in their hiring process" is perfectly legal and absolutely their right. No one is FORCED to hire someone.
For many years, I watched a process in state civil service, which is even more restricted and required to give veteran's preference than the place you interviewed with, which I suspect may have been a private contractor who administers federal monies. The thing is, vets were given preference in referrals to the job, where they may have fifteen interviewees with degrees and fairly equal amounts of experience. You got into the top two or three. But once you are up there, there is still the tiresome duty of selling yourself. That you "want" to work with vets is in no way an indicator that you would be good at doing it.
Counseling others requires many skills you may not have picked up in a military setting. For one thing, how would you relate to those veterans who are not real enough for you, who worked in the offices, who did not get combat wounded, but still need help now? So you could work with the worst of the worst damaged, because you (thousand yard stare here) have seen the worst. That doesn't make a counselor of you.
And even more than working with the vets, it is also a matter of working with the powers that be to help these vets obtain services. With this "we vets are going to get messed on, and we have to demand our rights!" attitude, you probably will not be very helpful, because a lot of these vets you'd be serving will have this same attitude, and will have already had problems working with civilian organizations and bureaucracies. They don't need a counselor who reinforces this.
And of course there is just the plain old likeability factor. No one is going to hire a ****y jerk who already, without real experience in doing this type of work, already knows much more about how to do it and the clients and the system and how everything has to work than the boss who is going to have to supervise them. Two minutes after you walked in, they perceived that they did not want to spend quality time in an office environment with you, because you would not relate to or respect anyone who has not had your particular experiences. It would be difficult for you to accept supervision, we can tell that just from your posts here.
You need to work not at suing somebody to force them to give you a job, which you don't have any case for that I can see, but in being perceived as a person who can do the job without bias or lack of respect for others.
