Thoughts on Veterans Day

My dad was a soldier.  Not for long, and he wasn’t a hero.  He did receive an honorable discharge, before his full two years were served due to being needed back on the farm after his father had been stricken with a stroke.  Also, the war being over, the military was letting soldiers go back home.

Dad was drafted when he was 19.  World War II was nearly over at the time (early 1945).  He hated it, and expressed that disdain for the rest of his life.  He hated the way he was treated by the drill sergeant in basic training.  He hated the way the men talked.  (He was raised on a farm in Ohio, in a church-going family that never drank or cursed, surrounded by similar families.)  He hated to get up early.  He had played horn in school, and was “drafted” to be the troop bugler at one point when he was overseas.  His letter home giving that news said, “The worst thing you can imagine has happened.  I have been ordered to play reveille…”  I gathered from his comments about the military as I was growing up that he believed it to be a necessary evil.  The only thing he expressed pleasure about was the award he had received for sharpshooting.

His unit had found out that Hitler was dead and the Germans had surrendered during their ocean voyage from the U.S. to Europe.  He was part of the clean-up crew.  I don’t have stories to relate, because he never talked about it.  I imagined that he was part of the effort to provide basic supplies to devastated villages, or capturing displaced German soldiers who would be processed and sent back to their homes.  I really don’t know.  The only things we have in the family keepsake trunk at my sister-in-law’s house are a couple of letters home and a large Nazi flag.  The letters make it evident that he was a very young and naïve 19-year-old.  He said “Boy, those girls sure are pretty!” about the local folk that they’d see swimming in the river as the boat he was on moved through the country.

He’s buried now in the local cemetery, just a few hundred yards from the spot where the little church used to be, where both he and I grew up.  Lots happened in the years after that service to his country.  He took over the farm after his father died, paying his mother a pension for life.  He married and had 3 kids and 8 grandchildren.  The farm became successful, but only after some very hard times.  One family anecdote is how, when I was an infant, he had to take a few bushels of corn from storage to sell at the local feed mill so that he could get money to buy groceries.  He developed it into a dairy farm and hoped that either my brother or I would take it over.  We failed to come through on that, and he sold the cows after a partnership arrangement with a neighbor didn’t work out.  He was in his late 60’s.  That was a sad day for us all.

His grave is marked with a granite gravestone for him and my mom, and there is also a bronze U.S. veteran’s marker on his side of the plot.  It honors his service, no matter how short.  His service was significant in that it was value-added at the time, and it was a great sacrifice for him and his parents.  He wasn’t there when his father had a stroke.  His not being there may have even been a factor in that stroke – only God knows about that. 

All veterans, both living and dead, who served their country honorably and with great sacrifice, deserve to be honored on this and all Veteran’s Days.  I’m glad that it remains on the 11^th and that our nation continues to celebrate it reverently – not as just another day off to go shopping, but to show respect and appreciation.  May we never again have to send young men and women into harm’s way.  Many of us wish that, and there are people in the world spending their lives and careers trying to make it be so.  More power to them.  My hope is that they are ultimately successful.  I support organizations that lobby to strengthen that approach (e.g., Friends Committee on National Legislation); and even at work, we (NASA) have a joint project with USAID based on the premise that it’s better (and cheaper) to make friends in the Third World than it is to remain aloof (or domineering) and end up in a conflict.  Peacemaking efforts honor veterans, too, as we recognize the significance and great human cost of their sacrifices by trying to prevent future generations from having to do the same.  "Blessed are the peacemakers..."