11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour
World War I, aka The Great War, began in 1914, between the European powers. American got into the war in 1917 after German U-Boats started attacking our merchant marines. So for the first three years of the War to End All Wars, so-named by Woodrow Wilson, the United States was neutral. By the time we got "Over There" France, England, Germany, Italy, Turkey, etc had already lost millions of soldiers to the war, a brutal affair where the military command was still fighting in the warfare style of the 18th and 19th centuries against 20th century weaponry, a fact that forced armies to seek cover down inside elaborate trenches. It was a bloodbath.
It didn't take long before America began to rack up casualties too, losing in about eighteen months more men than a decade of fighting in Vietnam would years later. Germany had thrown all it had at the war effort, men and materiel. On November 11, 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the antagonists signed an armistice, or a ceasefire. For the next 36 years, we commemorated November 11 as Armistice Day, and in some places, Remembrance Day. Armistice Day was what my parents told me it was called when they were growing up. After World War II came and went, the veterans from that war thought they deserved a day of commemoration too for their great sacrifices, and in 1954, Congress changed the name of the national holiday to Veteran's Day. But what does it mean now? Where I live there isn't even a Veteran's Day parade anymore, like the ones I remember as a child living in Corpus Christi. My family is full of veterans, mostly from WWII. Almost all the men I knew growing up, family and family friends, had served in some capacity in that war: my dad, my grandfather, several uncles, close family friends, even some of the women enlisted in various causes, and those that didn't still did SOMETHING, like taking old tin pots to a collection area to have them melted down for ammunition. Everyone gave up things to help the troops. People were issued ration books for groceries and blackout curtains were hung over windows. My mom told me about a U-Boat scare in Corpus Christi Bay when she was a girl, and the air raid sirens that would sound as drills. Her high school yearbook is filled with pictures of men in Navy uniforms, classmates or enlisted seaman from the Naval Air Station nearby.
It was nothing, even when I was a child, to see men with empty sleeves, or on crutches or in wheelchairs from limbs lost. My dad's closest friend was a double amputee who had been shelled in a foxhole during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the precursor of the more famous Battle of the Bulge. Another good friend of Daddy's had been hit by fire during the amphibious landings in the Bay of Salerno during the Invasion of Italy. My grandfather drove landing craft in the South Pacific at Leyte Gulf, and during that battle prayed to God that if He would see him through he would hand over his life. Shortly after he got home, my grandfather went into the ministry and became a Baptist preacher for the rest of his life.
The children of those 16-million veterans, my generation, were steeped in World War II. It was absorbed into us without having to be mentioned. It just lingered, everywhere around us, even in the row-house neighborhoods built for all those veterans and their new families. The kids played World War II in the streets, interspersed with Cowboys and Indians, of course. We knew how to make the sounds of ack-ack gunfire, and machine-guns, and bombs falling. A kid down the street could mimic perfectly a trench mortar letting off a round, so we even had a bit of the First World War thrown into our WWII street battles. I supposed kids are still playing war but doing it on the computer screens now, with realistic gore and trauma. Somehow it doesn't feel the same.
I sometimes wonder what in the world my dad, and all those long-gone veterans would think about the so-called division in our country now, or the January 6th insurrection. The last time he flew in a plane was to his squadron reunion in 2003. He got pulled out of the security line and wanded, all over his body until they located the problem: a roll of Tums in its foil wrapping inside his shirt pocket. Daddy looked the TSA agent in the face, and with a disappointed smile on his face, said, "I served in World War II. You think I'm a terrorist?" He was so insulted by the episode he never took a plane anywhere again. In the 1970s, I married a man who enlisted in the US Air Force. The salary for an E-2, his rank just after Basic Training, was so low, we not only qualified for Section 8 housing, but also for Food Stamps, known now as SNAP. After he got out we found a little house we wanted to buy, and since he qualified for a VA loan, our down-payment was only a single dollar bill. I remember watching the mortgage banker paperclip that dollar bill to our loan application, happy to be so lucky.
So let's celebrate and honor our veterans, but let's also continue to fund and support the GI Bill, which we have not always done readily. Let's give them the highest quality health care available instead of always skimping on that, even closing down military hospitals so veterans who are unable to travel long distances end up shut-out of the system. Let's provide mental health rehabilitation so they don't feel compelled to seek anti-government militia groups for camaraderie. It's too easy these days to forget about our veterans who may have been traumatized by the realities of modern-day guerrilla warfare. Let's provide enlisted service men and women with skills they can use once they're out of the military so they can continue to contribute their patriotism and their sense of duty and fairplay to American society. And for God's sake, let's stop using them as pawns in the game of political gotcha, or slapping magnetic signs on our cars that say "I support the military," a brag that has just become another meaningless slogan.
Happy Veteran's Day, America. Fly your flag!
Onward...
