Veterans Day
Grania on Nov 12 2007 at 6:00 am | Filed under: Soapbox
I get all mushy on Veterans Day. I am American. I was born here, I’ll die here. I love this country. A lot of people have sacrificed a lot for me to have the life that I have. That’s not lost on me.
Honoring veterans is important, but it’s also personal to me.
Today I take time to honor my dad’s brothers, who were all combat soldiers. I also honor my mom’s uncle, and many other people in my ancestry were also soldiers. I am the same age as many who went to the Gulf in the first war there and I have a dear friend that was a Marine in that arena. These men all served this beautiful country that I am proud to live in. They did what they had to to make us as safe as possible.
Freedom isn’t free. It’s a fragile thing that needs to be protected with the lives of men and women. Soldiers that understand and care enough to do that sometimes very ugly job, day in and day out, so I can sit here and fuck off on my computer, safe in my house, and whine about my little life. While I do that, they’re out there getting blown apart by an enemy that hates their guts just because they’re from here. That’s not lost on me either.
Dad had 4 brothers. Two of them died within a couple of years of returning from World War 2. They drank themselves to death. There was no understanding or counseling then for shell shock, or post traumatic stress as it’s called now. Another lived until I was a kid, maybe 1970 or so, when he fell down the stairs drunk and sustained a head injury that killed him. He was the definition of shell shocked. He came home broken. He stayed that way until he died. The 4th brother, the youngest, fought in Korea. He had a good life with his Korean wife. They had 5 kids and he died of cancer well into his old age. One out of 5 of them lived into old age. 3 of the 4 that died young were all War Veterans. It takes its toll.
My mother’s uncle died on the beach at Normandy 20+ years before I was born. He was the son of a German immigrant, fighting for America. I’d have to look up his name, I don’t remember it, but I honor him too.
My friend from the Gulf War, he’s got the most beautiful, gentle, wondrous childlike soul, but there’s a very big part of that time of his life that he won’t talk about, that he’s still tortured about. It makes me sad. We met for lunch one day, and the restaurant was particularly crowded. We had to take a table in the center of the room, and he spent the whole meal uncomfortable because he still doesn’t like to be that exposed. 15 years after coming home, if there’s not a wall to his back, he gets squirmy. We ended up leaving pretty quickly and finished our discussion in a quiet park right down the street. He was much less distracted.
There are more stories that I could tell. Less personal to me. All of them about men that sacrificed their day to day lives for a cause that they believed in, some of them that returned forever changed, and some that returned in a body bag.
There are stories about the ones that stayed home too. My dad was badly burned as a child and as a result was missing parts of his fingers. He couldn’t fire a rifle, so they wouldn’t let him enlist like his brothers did. He turned 18 in 1940, during the heat of World War II, and he watched his brothers go off one by one and felt the guilt and responsibility of staying home, caring for his mother, and getting on with life while they were living in hell.
Dad was American, through and through, even if he couldn’t fight for his country, he could play his part back at home. He was proud of his brothers, and God help you if you bashed this country or it’s leaders. That wasn’t tolerated. They may be bad leaders, but they were and are still leaders. Respect the position if you can’t respect the man. Dad was all about honoring his brothers on Veterans Day. He couldn’t be a veteran himself, and that tore him up inside, but he did what he could to teach us what it meant.
Today I’m at work. I don’t think that’s right, but I work for a Japanese company. Go figure that they wouldn’t want to celebrate a holiday that honors the soldiers that nuked their country. Kind of an ironic twist isn’t it. At least they give us Memorial Day off. They understand honoring the dead.
Yesterday I was driving through our village on the way to the store. There was a ceremony going on at the war memorial that’s by the Village Hall. The park was packed. It felt good to see that. There are others out there that have the respect and honor and dignity enough to thank those in my village that did their part to protect my freedom. Another friend of mine is another Gulf War vet. He’s on the village committee here that is partly responsible for that ceremony. I’m proud of him. It’s a good thing that he does every year.
I don’t know anyone among my friends that hasn’t had a soldier among their family and friends.
Take some time today to appreciate the hard won, high priced gift that those men and women give us every day.
Freedom.
