Veterans Day

Katherine Kersten let us know again today about the meaning of honoring our veterans. In case you missed it, it’s building memorials, like the one in Rochester. It was the typical superficiality we’ve come to expect from KK, but I’m sure she tries to do the best she can with what she has to work with.

I do think it is good to have such tangible memorials to our war veterans. I’ve been to the one in my hometown to see the name of my father’s best friend from high school, who died in the English channel when his transport was torpedoed on Christmas Day 1944. I’ve run my fingers over the name of my high school buddy on the black wall in Washington. And I’ve looked through the private memorial constructed by my mother-in-law out of the contents of the foot locker of her brother who went down in a B-24 over Germany in 1943. (Disclosure: I was drafted in 1972, but flunked the physical.)

I have one relative, who as one of the 5th Rangers, stood in an LST bobbing in the waves off Pointe du Hoc on D-Day, watching his unit be slaughtered as they tried to get up that cliff, and knowing he’d be next if they failed. He didn’t have to fight that day, but he did in the hedgerows in France, on the bridges in Holland, and in a Belgian town called Bastogne. He won one Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts (which he called the medal for being stupid enough to get shot) and all of 1945 and part of 1946 having his leg pinned back together and learning to walk again with a persistent slight limp.

Two uncles missed that war but got in in time to both freeze in Korea and sweat in Vietnam. They got three Silver Stars and a couple of Purple Hearts between them. Their four sons and sons-in-law missed Vietnam, but did go to Germany for the Cold War, and Iraq in the first Gulf war. One cousin saw men under his command killed in a training accident. One cousin drove a tank into Baghdad three years ago.

And one of those cousins was notified this week that his son is on his way to Iraq after the first of the year. He’s heartbroken, as are we.

I once asked one of these guys why he hadn’t ever joined the VFW or American Legion. He just said anyone who’d ever actually been in combat would never want to glorify it in any way, and left it at that.

Honor yes, glory no.

What we’re doing now for our current armed forces is no honor to the memory of our veterans.

We’ll send my cousin’s son to war short of enough men and equiment to keep him and his comrades relatively safe. We’ll have tax cuts and bridges in Alaska.

Today, we will fire salutes at Arlington, where my uncle is buried, and at Fort Snelling, and at the memorial in Rochester Kersten writes about. We’ll be there even though our president has yet to attend even one funeral of one soldier killed in this Iraq war.

We’ll place flags on soldiers’ graves while the flag draped coffins from Iraq are unloaded and buried out of the public eye, except for the obligatory stories from the local press about the local boy who played high school football and married his childhood sweetheart.

We’ll hear from a president who used the National Guard to duck his own obligation while he uses guys who signed up for the Guard to get money for college to clear roadside bombs and fight house to house in Fallujah.

And we’ll bitch about gas prices half of what the rest of the world pays while some of our regular Army are getting ready for their fourth tour in Iraq.

My uncle once said, "I can’t believe Bush said ‘Bring it on.’ Nobody who has ever been in combat would ever say that. I was always hoping the enemy would hear me saying, ‘Take it somewhere else.’"

Those are the sort of veterans I can honor every day–those who know what it is and went anyway. I can’t honor those who don’t know what it is, and send others to do it.