Veterans Day

Two years I wrote a post which began:

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,... 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....

Since then, of course we had ever accumulating proof of that, in the Walter Reed scandal (you do remember that?); we've had "Warriors in Transition" (the catchy new name for wounded soldiers on their way to discharge via the VA and therapy); acres of missing paperwork - much of it shredded "in error"; "personality disorders" being diagnosed by the dozens so soldiers can be kicked out of the army without benefits; six months and more for initial claims to be processed; National Guardsmen brought back from Iraq after 729 days of active duty - so they don't qualify for the educational benefits that kick in at 730... Need I go on? I could.

Today is Veterans Day. It's not Memorial Day. It's not a day to refuse to fight wars - some wars are necessary. What it is is a day to honestly assess the price of the war - any war - to those who fight it and come home, and to promise ourselves to do the right thing by them. Because it is the right thing. Because we owe it to them. Because we sent them into harm's way, and they were harmed, and our contract with them is to take care of them. As I said before,

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.

Let's stop all our ultimately empty fetishization of the military, like calling them "Wounded Warriors" in ordinary prose. Let's stop capitalizing Solider and Wounded Warrior and Troop - and stop capitalizing on them, too. Let's stop the relentless glorification of the figure of the soldier, and start actually caring about them. Let's stop Supporting the Troops with magnets and signs, and start some actual damned support - with money, first of all, money and beds and hospitals and benefits that actually are.

Let's save the worship for Memorial Day. Today's for the ones who are still alive, and most of all for the ones who still need us.

Last year my poem was Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon (read it here), and the year before it was 1916 seen from 1921 by Edmund Blunden (read it here). This year I offer you Robert Graves' The Next War:

YOU young friskies who today

Jump and fight in Father’s hay

With bows and arrows and wooden spears,

Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,

Happy though these hours you spend,

Have they warned you how games end?

Boys, from the first time you prod

And thrust with spears of curtain-rod,

From the first time you tear and slash

Your long-bows from the garden ash,

Or fit your shaft with a blue jay feather,

Binding the split tops together,

From that same hour by fate you’re bound

As champions of this stony ground,

Loyal and true in everything,

To serve your Army and your King,

Prepared to starve and sweat and die

Under some fierce foreign sky,

If only to keep safe those joys

That belong to British boys,

To keep young Prussians from the soft

Scented hay of father’s loft,

And stop young Slavs from cutting bows

And bendy spears from Welsh hedgerows.

Another War soon gets begun,

A dirtier, a more glorious one;

Then, boys, you’ll have to play, all in;

It’s the cruellest team will win.

So hold your nose against the stink

And never stop too long to think.

Wars don’t change except in name;

The next one must go just the same,

And new foul tricks unguessed before

Will win and justify this War.

Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage

Once more with pomp and greed and rage;

Courtly ministers will stop

At home and fight to the last drop;

By the million men will die

In some new horrible agony;

And children here will thrust and poke,

Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke,

With bows and arrows and wooden spears,

Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers.