Armistice Day Or Veterans Day?

It's Armistice Day, proclaimed as the ceasefire of the Great War, the "war to end all wars" also known as the First World War.

Of three, so far; with the U.S. dropping tens of thousands of bombs all over the globe every year no matter whether the man in the White House has a D or an R after his name, I consider that WWIII is already underway whether we admit it or not.

There will be a lot of flag waving and bloviating on television about how grateful the U.S. is to the men and women who fight in wars few of their neighbors could explain, or even find on a map.

The veterans I know don't want to be thanked for their service.



They don't want to watch parades glorifying the military, or hear false claims about how those in uniform are defending freedom. 

The veterans I know want to make reparations for the harm they've done while in uniform. Harm to the women raped, the children burnt by napalm or by bombs from flying killer robots. Harm to the environment from chemical warfare and the giant carbon bootprint of the Pentagon, with its 800+ bases in other countries.

The veterans I know want to remind us that war is not the right answer to conflict. That violence doesn't solve conflicts but it often creates lots of new ones.

The veterans I know want to heal, and most of them realize they'll carry the wounds from their moral injuries for the rest of their lives.

The veterans I know don't commit suicide. But, they've thought about it. 

As a veteran turned historian observed, 

The veterans in my family are gone now. They survived Armistice Day lying wounded and gassed on a battleground in Europe. They survived occupying Nagasaki shortly after it was destroyed by the testing of a second kind of atomic bomb. They occupied Korea and saw how the people had suffered there, how they couldn't feed their children.

The veterans in my family told their children: "Don't believe it when they say the next war is a good one. There is no such thing."

Some of the veterans I know write poems. Good poems. Sometimes the poems help them heal and stay alive. 

Here's one from Doug Rawlings, a founding member of Veterans for Peace. Doug teaches peace studies at the University of Maine, Farmington. He works on projects to accurately remember our wars, and to heal. 

NOVEMBER COMES

November comes on to me like a C-130
slinking into Dover Air Force base
laden with tin caskets
draped in red, white, and blue

I know, I know
I should just
let it be

Okay.
I can still do this:
push my shopping cart down
the local IGA's aisles
pick up cheese and wines and crackers
while avoiding aluminum cans
like the plague
pay the cashier
smile at the bagger
push the cart out into the parking lot
neatly place everything I just bought

into the dumpster out back

light up a smoke
relax

Sure, sure,
you want me to join in
on your celebrations
bless our bounty
accept your thanks
for my service
as if I were some Pilgrim
come home to receive your grace

It is November, you say, and we set aside
a day just for you to wrap up war
with the dissonance of fife and drum
and bagpipes blaring down main street

as if we can all finally dance
to the same tune

Sorry about that

My dancing days are long gone
I'd rather skate across the pond alone

I have more faith in ice 

-- Doug Rawlings