What I Would Change about Veterans Day

Honoring those who have served our country, as we do today as we always have, in the military has always been an idea that has advanced with general acquiescence. I mean, who can object? They put themselves on the line for what we believe to be our freedoms (or someone else's, the difference being in the pudding). Nothing can be greater than that.

It has touched my family in no small way. My father and four uncles served in World War II. One uncle had to kill a German hand-to-hand. He did not comment on it for more than thirty years.

One's life was saved when a buddy relieved him in his communications unit on Guadalcanal when he saw that he was exhausted and needed a break, then was picked off by a sniper. He married, had a family, and lived well into his 90s.

One was on burial patrol in the South Pacific, putting stinking bodies in the ground, and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1969. Think of the nightmares.

I now have a nephew who's a tank commander in the Minnesota National Guard. Is he safe? Consider this: The mayor of North Ogden, Utah, was a Guard member. He did several hitches in Afghanistan. Last week, he was killed by a traitor who turned on him. He left a wife and seven kids. My nephew wants to be a Ranger.

Beyond that, Steven W. Castner, Wisconsin National Guard, was killed by an IED in Iraq in 2006. He graduated from Cedarburg High School, where I taught for a while with his mother. He had already served four years in the Air Force, and re-upped. He knew what he was doing.

I salute all of them today, the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: those who made it back home and those who did not. But I find nothing sacred in it. Somber, yes; sobering, of course. But not sacred.

To be sacred about this means that we consider war service to be, on its own, sacred--as sacred as we call other things, such as religion. It would not be absurd to contend that in this society, the two have been joined, perhaps fused together. Some of the pretentious pronunciations on this day of remembrance will reiterate that.

That would be wrong. Both sides of World War I invoked supernatural assistance: the German motto was Gott mit uns--God with us. Guess that didn't work out for them. It had to fail for someone, because the way wars are won are not with prayer, but with resources and technology and people power and resolve to absorb death and destruction a day longer than someone else.

We turn to Lincoln, again, to set that straight, as he did in his Second Inaugural, commenting on how both sides of the Civil War did the same thing: Both read the same bible and pray to the same God and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange for any men to ask a just God's assistance by taking his bread from the sweat of other people's faces, but let us judge not so we are not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered: that of neither have been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.

So one thing I would change, if I could, about Veterans Day is that religion not be invoked, and that God's name would not be mentioned in any speeches and reflected in any implicit or explicit imagery, by politicians or anyone else for that matter. For in fact, it's blasphemous to do so if God is connected with mass slaughter. Isn't it? I mean, shouldn't it be so?

Whatever the Bible says about the nobility of giving up one's life for one's friends can be just as easily reflected in the other side's intent, regardless of whatever religion be utilized as justification for starting and continuing the killing of other human beings. Unquestionably, all writing by war participants makes this point: That nothing else really matters except one's comrades. The larger issues of war, including any pretense of morality, disappear under lethal fire. The only point becomes getting back home. If you doubt this, try All Quiet on the Western Front, written about World War I by someone on the side that didn't win.

On the Western Front--that maelstrom of death and disease and rats that lasted four years and the terrain-borne scars of which have lasted literally until the present day--soldiers on both sides sang "Silent Night" together during a cease-fire on Christmas Eve. They observed the presence of the supernatural. Then they went on blowing each other to bits, entering that supernatural far before their appointed times should have been.

Another thing I'd change is the insistence that Veterans Day be the subject of whatever sales that businesses want to kick-start as part of the Christmas season. To me, it's craven to link this day of reflection with making money off of it, like that of the Madison Avenue-created days of Mother's and Father's Days and other ersatz celebrations. It pulls today down to the level of the dollar sign.

The only reason that grilling out isn't also done in mass practice is that, by this time, it's too darn cold outside. We have enough desecration taking place on Memorial Day the way it is. And the connection of military culture with our sports culture is deep and, I'm afraid, permanent. The phraseology and insistence of networks to loop in soldiers and sailors to connect with the general public, including flyovers, during games is well-established--but inappropriate, the same way that praying for victory in the Super Bowl is.

I'm no peacenik. Sometimes wars are necessary. But the increasingly informal and casual way in which celebrations connected with wars are made lead us too far into matter-of-fact thinking on the waging of wars themselves. That devalues those who we call upon to fight and die, as well as the purposes for which they have done so. We file it under "glory" when we should be far more somber and evaluative, filing it under "sad duty" instead.

Maybe if we thought more seriously about this day, the blowing of "Taps" might actually happen one last time, for the last person to die in the last war. At the very least, not nearly as many and not nearly as often.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark