Throw Veterans Day away

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.editorialboard.com/throw-veterans-day-away/

Today’s is Veterans Day. It’s one day of the year set aside to honor men and women who fought bravely for their country. But what if I were to suggest another meaning? What if I were to suggest we have it mostly wrong?

From July to November in 1916, 1 million men died, or their lives, and the lives of everyone they loved, were changed forever. One million. These were men who really understood what war was about. It was about dying, agony and death.

My inspiration is Kurt Vonnegut. You may know him. He’s the author of 1973’s Breakfast of Champions, among many others. In the preface, Vonnegut talks about remembering Veterans Day in its original form.

This is what he said.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

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.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Preface to Breakfast of Champions, 1973.

*snip*

[FakeNoose]

1. In WWI and WWII we were the good guys, the saviors

After that, we weren't.

So it's hard to be nostalgic or sentimental about wars in which we were the marauders, the invaders, the confiscators. Nobody thanked us as we left Vietnam, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. They were glad to see us go, and they waited for the reparations money for rebuilding their countries after we blew them to smithereens. And what about the countries we never left, like South Korea ...?

Veterans Day is for all the men and women who have sacrificed for our country, and they didn't get to be the good guys. But they did their duty anyway, and we need to appreciate them doing it.

Thank you Veterans, from all of us free and proud Americans!

[nitpicker]

3. I don't know if you know about the Korean War

Even if it ended in an armistice, South Korea officially is still very grateful about the many who came from all over the world (including the US) to push back the enemies, and organizations sponsor revisit tours for Korean war vets and their families. And the wreaths keep being laid at the Korean War memorial in DC, plus annual commemoration ceremonies.

[DashOneBravo]

9. Exactly

Somewhere there is a picture of South Korea and North Korea at night. Quite a contrast .

And they kept asking my dad to come back for one of the celebrations. They were throwing for the vets who fought in the war.

[marie999]

10. I often wonder what Korea would be like now if the U.S. and Russian hadn't turn it into 2 countries?

[FakeNoose]

11. I am grateful to all Korean War Veterans

That was my Dad's era, also my uncles'. Yes we did rescue South Korea from communism and they are better off for it.

I just don't like the idea that we Americans felt it was up to us to "save the world from communism." It's obviously untrue, and we've paid a huge price for that piece of fiction in the last 70 years.

[greenjar_01]

13. You sure we were the good guys in WWI? How so?

Just a big fight between colonial powers over who should get the most pillage. Good guys my left foot.

[hunter]

2. I remember all the young, mostly men, who fought in useless wars.

[Torchlight]

4. Lt. Siegfried Sassoon wrote what I find to be

the most accurate statement of war ever penned by a soldier.

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

[gratuitous]

5. Clearly not in vogue

Any more than when e.e. cummings sang of olaf:

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)


but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

[Devil Child]

6. No n/t

[maxsolomon]

7. I was given Breakfast of Champions as a birthday present.

Probably in 1975 when I was 11 or so.

I was a shockingly adult book to give an 11 year old, but it really stuck with me.

[LiberalFighter]

8. I get tired of the multitude of days recognized for veterans.

I have seen postings on FB for different wars, birth of different branches and in many cases they have the wrong dates.

And get tired of people claiming a specific military anniversary is not recognized when it was several months earlier.

If they want to recognize veterans outside of Veterans Day it should only apply to those that served in those wars. They need to prove they served in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Spanish American War, World War I, or any other action. No different than the benefits from Congress or the states was based on when they served and in some cases how long.

[roamer65]

12. I want it to go back to Armistice Day.

Show the brutality of war, not glorify it.

Memorial Day serves the purpose of remembering armed forces.