It's Veteran's Day -- and I do thank you for your service. It was Armistice Day to begin with, the end of a war that left a scar twisting across the face of Europe. Some of the WW I battlefield is still uninhabitable.
Someone who was my age when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour in 1918 would have had clear memories of the U. S. Civil war. That includes some of the soldiers and sailors. One officer is known to have served during both wars -- and the ones in between. And the scars from the Civil War remain, too, not as dead or as deadly as France's Red Zones but they're still there, etched across the land, scrawled across history, written on gravestones and in family histories. War extracts a terrible price and it falls most heavily on the young and strong. Even in peacetime, most military service consists of long hours of hard work for low pay.
Those people in uniform are us. Just like you, your neighbors, the people you work with and the kids you went to school with. They're a mixed bag -- smart, dumb, short, tall, liberals, conservatives and people who just don't care about politics. They grew up poor, middle-class and wealthy. They're every color and all the same color -- green or Navy blue or whatever. What they have in common is they stepped up. They are doing -- or they have done -- the job, often far from home, frequently in terrible weather, and, at times, with the understanding there are other people not too far away who intend to kill them.
I try not to be too glib with, "Thank you for your service." That service is not something you can nod at acknowledging one day a year and call it good enough.
FYI, Major General Peter Hains, the officer who served in the Civil War and the Great War, left a legacy of service. His son, grandson (also a major general), great-grandson and great-great-grandson were all Army officers.
ReplyDeleteNot all of his sons had untarnished careers, either. Real people are complicated.
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