The Eleventh

When I was a kid, my parents would often go to dances at “The Vets Club.”  That was the VFW club, of course, Veterans of Foreign Wars.  I was raised in the 1970’s, my parents products of the depression, their friends including many veterans of WWII. 

Dad was 4-F back in 1943, his high blood pressure preventing him, to his disgust, from serving his country.  His younger brother Harold went into the Army, and there was a bitter envy that followed, and my Dad never really got past it. 

My Uncle Ray served in Korea.  When he got back, he had nightmares.  My aunt told my mom that they went to the Black Hills in South Dakota once and the scenery reminded him so much of Korea that Ray never wanted to go back.

What I knew about veterans growing up was sketchy and vague.  I watched TV shows about Vietnam, but didn’t know many vets from that war.  As time went by, veterans became those old guys at the beginning of the parades in our hometown, the ones who ran insurance agencies and auto body shops, dressed a few times a year in their VFW finery, carrying the flags and glaring at us until we put our hands over our hearts, the sun beating down on their balding heads as we snapped our chewing gum and giggled restlessly, waiting for the rest of the parade to get rolling.

They were the old guys selling poppies at the back of the church and in the lobby of the grocery store, tiny paper flowers with white paper labels.  They were the men in white short-sleeved dress shirts and bolo ties at the VFW club, holding opaque plastic drink cups of beer or manhattans, listening to the band and dancing the two-step with their bouffanted wives.

Now it is years later, and I’m introduced to a whole new waves of veterans.  I had thought the word veteran would always be associated with old starchy men in parades or vets club dances, all of them with grey hair, taciturn and grandfatherly.

And now, because of the most recent wars, veterans are guys I went to high school with, men who served in the reserves and are now recruiting younger men to go to war.  They are boys I used to babysit, young children who tinkered with cars and listened to Nirvana, and who later joined the Army to get college money, watched the towers fall in New York, and were shipped to Iraq to fight an illusive enemy.

They are women who wear fatigues and leave behind babies and pre-schoolers, standing in formation and calling their families on satellite phones or using webcams to talk husbands through potty-training pointers.

They are my nephew Gabe, coming home from two tours in Iraq and forming a basement band, working on heating and air conditioning systems, and preparing to welcome his first child in a few weeks.  I grew up surrounded by veterans.  Now they are harder to spot.  They are young now, younger than me.  Some carry the flag in parades.  Others seem like kids to me, and it finally dawned on me that every veteran sacrifices for his or her country.  They sacrifice their youth, their freedom, their share of everyday normalcy, their peaceful dreams at night…all of it is sacrificed for our country.

Old men and young men, they all had different reasons to serve.  Whether out of ringing patriotism or pragmatism, whether for honor or duty or scholarship money or vengeance or pride or tradition, they all served at great cost to themselves.   Even those who may have privately questioned the reasons for going to war fought in it. 

We owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for their service, and the promise to never send them to fight a war that could have been avoided.  We owe them decent physical and mental health care.  We owe them dignity and respect, and awareness of their sacrifice.

I salute them all this Veterans Day.