Veterans Day

As Kurt Vonnegut remarked,

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

Eight 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, eat 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 the stark 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, "personality disorders" being diagnosed by the dozens so soldiers (and no, I won't capitalize it, we aren't Germans, we don't capitalize ordinary nouns, and this is just another ultimately empty fetishization of the military, like calling them "Wounded Warriors" in ordinary prose) can be kicked out of the army without benefits; months of waiting for VA treatment; in fact, in this year's own scandal, we learned that some even die first. Need I go on?

What's more, we keep starting wars of choice and sending people to fight them. I know, I know: Freedom isn't free. No more it is, but let's stop pretending that any war we've fought since WWII was actually about our freedom. The president says he won't send troops to fight - "no boots on the ground" - but thousands of American soldiers are on their way now. And it won't stop there.

Today is Veterans Day. It's not Memorial Day. It's 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 (one way or another, they were harmed, war harms everyone it touches). 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.

And we really don't need some damned "Concert for Valor" on the Mall. That "gigantic display of patriotism" will not feed one homeless vet, put one injured one into a bed, or find one job. It will entertain some serving soldiers who are lucky enough to get down there, and (most importantly) put a lot of money into HBO's pockets. That's not what they need.

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 free dinners and tire deals, 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.

I've offered a number of poems for today: 1916 seen from 1921 by Edmund Blunden; Siegfried Sassoon's Aftermath (written a year after WWI); Li Po's Nefarious War, translated from the Chinese by Shigeyoshi Obata (with its key line: The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home. That's the kind of war we can pretend is going well, because we can't see it or its fighters.); The Next War by Robert Graves; and a pair of short poems by Carl Sandburg, written during WWI: Iron and Grass; Wilfred Owens's great Dulce et Decorum Est; Steven Vincent Benet's Minor Litany; and Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon.


This year I offer you Tom Greening's Nicht Neues im Westen:

Back in 1928 Erich Maria Remarque
confronted us with the image
of the beheaded soldier
still running,
with blood 'like a fountain'
spouting from his neck.
That's the statue we need
in every park and square
to commemorate what we do so well:
run toward war,
headless.