Which is this Day: Armistice or Veterans?

It's called "Veterans Day" here in the States - we renamed it, I guess, when it became clear that the War to End War hadn't and wouldn't. So it's Veterans Day, now - not Memorial Day, for the dead, that's in May, in the spring... Is that a bit perverse of us? Memory of the dead in the spring, when the earth is throwing out new life as fast as it can, tossing pastel branches of fruit trees and new green grass and birds and young beasts in field and wood... then we remember the dead. This day, the fall - the end of fall, hard on winter already, sometimes even snow (maybe always snow by now depending on where you live, but here only a year in a dozen) - now, when the earth prepares for the long sleep of winter, leaves red and orange like funeral pyres or bare limbs and yellowed grass, now we remember the living.

At least, we say we do. Well, I'm a veteran. I don't want just another day off work with no commitment behind it to actually give a damn about the veterans, especially those who come home from these modern wars all torn up, because medicine can save their bodies, only to find that no one in the government intends to take care of them. Veterans Day is nothing more than automobile sales, and servicemen get a 5% discount!, and wear your uniform, get in free! It's not go to a hospital and see what the price really is; it's not lobby the congress to restore the benefits cut in 1995; it's not give them their meds and counseling on time and affordably; it's not tell the VA to actively take care of vets instead of waiting for them to find out on their own what they're eligible for. And it's most certainly not the government actually giving a damn.

We don't need Veterans Day. We don't need people paying lip service to vets while ignoring them in the VA hospitals or on the street corners. We don't need to mythologize veterans, turn them into some great symbol of our nation's righteous aggression while we forget their humanity. We don't need a holiday that glorifies war by glorifying soldiers.

Armistice Day all too quickly became a symbol of a failed hope - a hope that we could learn to live with each other. But that hope is worthy of more honor than the cynical ploy of talking about how we honor the veterans while ignoring their needs and plotting to make more of them.

Armistice Day is usually marked by the simple and lyrical "In Flanders Fields". I know you know it - I used to post it every year on my division's internal web site, back when I maintained that at work. I wouldn't this year... I just reread the poem over on Orac's site and I was immediately struck by how passionately the narrator wanted the war to go on. "Take up our quarrel with the foe," he says, and "if ye break faith with us who die." It's quite beautiful, perhaps, but I don't think I know any longer what that poem is really about. Anyhow, it's more a Memorial Day poem, I think. It's about the dead.

Here's my poem for Veterans Day - or Armistice Day, if you prefer:


1916 seen from 1921
by Edmund Blunden

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I,
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

I rise up at the singing of a bird
And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,
I dare not give a soul a look or word
Where all have homes and none's at home in vain:
Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,
The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,
In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,
The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

Sweet Mary'’s shrine between the sycamores!
There we would go, my friend of friends and I,
And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,
Whose dark made light intense to see them by.
Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots
Spun from the wrangling wire: then in warm swoon
The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,
We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.