To All the Vets

Today is Veteran’s Day. Veteran’s Day was originally called Armistice Day, in recognition of the armistice that ended World War I. Promptly at the stroke of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent and the butchery of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, finally came to a close.

There is only one British veteran of World War I remaining, and he is 109 years old. It might be too much to ask or expect that he will see the passage of another Veterans’ Day. However, this morning, I saw film of him greeting and talking to British veterans of Iraq, just home from deployment there. Somehow, it seemed a fitting completion of the circle.

My father is 87. He is a member of what Tom Brokaw has dubbed the Greatest Generation. His peers, friends, and family members went to war to defeat the forces of Fascism. These men and women are dying off at the rate of 1,000 per day, and before long, there won’t be any World War II vets left, either. Similarly, Korean War vets are of the same generation, and usually only a few years younger, as the entire Korean War was fought less than ten years after the end of World War II. Korea is, of course, often called the forgotten war, and for good reason. It was a horrible, grinding war far from home where many Americans died in a proxy war against Communism.

Today, our soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will avoid ranting about the failed policies of the Bush Administration and instead focus on the sacrifices of these good men and women to whom we owe our freedom and to whom we owe our security.

Thank you to all of the veterans for your contributions to making America the country that it is today.