A Veteran's Day Meditation

Some months back I wrote, buoyed by the persistent fears of a father, how my son the Army Special Ops Captain was leaving for Afghanistan to begin yet another tour of duty. Indeed, in “Wrestling with a Young Man’s Duty,” I attempted, amongst other things, to articulate the dread that every parent, wife, or child must countenance when their loved one flies away from their care and into Harm’s Way. Having invested so much of our hope and joy into these brave young hearts spinning away from us, a part of us stops breathing and stands in limbo on a shelf until they return. Last week, my “Young Captain” came home, and I could finally begin to go about the business of living again — of planting for the harvest that all living creatures undertake as they toil in the expectation of happiness and meaning.

Today is Veteran’s Day. In order that we may understand in truth, one’s inquiry must start at the very beginning.

The Great War, as it was once known, had been the most terrible conflagration of artificially imposed human death, suffering, and misery that had been experienced in modern times. This cataclysm of sixteen million dead and twenty million wounded irrevocably changed the cultural/political landscape and the very gene pool of Europe. So great was the collective cry of relief when the Entente and Central Powers laid down their arms on that crisp Fall morning, that what we now know as World War I was universally heralded as the final “war to end all wars.” In retrospect, the melding of unabashed hope and naïve hubris accompanying such a bold claim can now only raise an occasional cynical brow of incredulity; for we have since been bitterly schooled in the unveiled horrors of the human heart — culled from the flinty crucible of the Twentieth Century.

But on the eleventh day of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month in the Year of Our Lord 1918, if for only a brief span of years, our spears — even if not fully beaten into ploughshares, were put aside as men provisionally swore in their chests to make war on one another no longer. That following year, American President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed:

To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…