Thanks to veterans

Today is Veteran's Day.

I never served - my career path didn't suggest "military" as an option for me (also, flat feet and knee problems when I was a teen, and bad vision, might have kept me out, at least from some branches). I didn't have to serve. The only people I knew in high school who planned to go into the military were doing it through one of the service academies, which were pretty competitive.

But I know that I sit here safe today, and I continue to enjoy the freedoms I have, because of the service of others. People who went and did something that either I could not do, or which I was born into a later era than. People who (in many cases) volunteered to go and risk dying for their country or their countrymen and women.

I grew up in the era of what you might call non-war. Vietnam was a memory (while it was happening while I was a child, I remember almost nothing from it - my parents tended to insulate my brother and me from the news when we were small, and I don't think that's an entirely bad thing). Most of the things that happened were "police actions" or seemed to be on a smaller scale. Grenada, getting what's-his-name out of Nicaragua, Bosnia....even the first Gulf War, I remember it mostly being over in a couple days. (Things are a little different now, but the enemy is also different. I think it's fundamentally different and perhaps in some ways fundamentally harder when the people who pose a threat aren't an organized army of a specific country, but rather bands of terrorists)

I do remember hearing about WWII vets' experience; many of the men I went to church with as a kid had served, some of my teachers had served (or had served in Korea). WWII seems to have been a very different time; for one thing, most every family had someone who was called up or who volunteered. There were a lot of home-front sacrifices - my parents were small children then and they remember some of the things. I can't imagine Americans willingly making some of the same sacrifices today.

I will say a lot of the men who served in WWII seemed to cope with the bad memories by not talking about it. And you kind of knew not to press for "war stories" from those people. 

I even remember talking with a few who served in WWI. Which is why we commemorate this day. I've explained to students (some seem not to know) that today is VETERAN'S Day, not MEMORIAL Day, and it is Veteran's Day because it is the day the Armistice of World War I was signed. ("The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," I remember one of my grade-school history teachers intoning). WWI was a pretty horrible war for the guys in the trenches, from what I have read of it. Brutal, ugly, lots of death, lots of lingering wounds. It's the war where "shell shock" became a word. (I suppose that is now called PTSD? I don't know if they're quite the same). A war when chemical weapons were used. (May we never see that again).

This was also the war that led to the poppies. You don't see them much in the US any more*, but I remember when I was a kid, the guy from VFW standing outside the grocery store, handing out little crepe-paper poppies and taking donations. I remember wearing a poppy on my coat when I was a little kid and not really knowing what it was for, other than that it was Important and it had something to do with old men who did something important many years ago. (My grandmother, I remember she had an old linen-towel calendar up in her kitchen, with a whole raft of poppies from past years pinned to it. Well, she had a brother who was an infantryman and she had known men who went "over there" and never came back, so I am sure it was much more meaningful to her than it ever was to me).

(It is kind of weird to think about it - that I'm really only 2 generations removed from something that happened nearly 100 years ago now.)

(*It seems that Britain and other Commonwealth countries still do the poppy memorial, to a much greater extent than we do. I am not sure why we don't. I hate it when people forget history, forget the things that shaped the world they live in now)

My paternal grandfather was an "experimental aviator" during that time but he never saw overseas service. In fact, he did a lot of his work in the US Aviation Services here in Oklahoma (and oh, how I wish I had paid more attention to his stories when I was a kid.)

I wonder if next year, which is the centennial of the "official" beginning of WWI, if we will see more remembrance, if people will learn more about the war that originated Veteran's Day (formerly known as Armistice Day, and some people still called it that when I was a kid). I know I want to learn more about the war that I've heard described as "when we broke history" or as "the last Napoleonic war." Not because I want to glorify war - war is a terrible thing, but sometimes in this world, terrible things must be done to prevent even more terrible things - but so I can remember the men and women (there were nurses killed during WWI....) who lost their lives.

I hope we don't forget WWII the way we've largely forgotten WWI, as the last WWII vets are dying out. (Though my mom remarked, they had the vets from different eras stand in their church yesterday, and she was surprised at how many WWII vets there still are. I don't know that there are any left in my church - I know one man who was involved with the Berlin Airlift, but he may be the last one of that era in my church)