Today is Veteran’s Day.
Both of my grandfathers were in the Navy in World War II. My old stepdad was in Vietnam. There’s not many people in this country who do not have a close family member that is a veteran. It’s trite and cliche, but without these people, many of the things you read on this site would get us put in jail.
Freedom has a great price. Today is the day when we attempt to repay that cost. When I was in 7th grade, our class took a trip to Washington, D.C. I really enjoyed all the sites that we visited and I was a kid having a great time. As the bus pulled up to the Vietnam Memorial Wall, I could barely see what it was. It seemed like just a slit cut into the ground, like some sad attempt at mining.
And then I got closer. The dark granite just pulls you in like a waiting pool of sorrow. The names seem to at once run together into a mass of pain at the same time that each name jumps out at you in singular screams of loss. The air is palpable in that place. You can feel the eyes of the fallen.
Just as our class was getting ready to leave, I noticed a woman trying to make a “rubbing” on the wall of one of her loved one’s name. She was quite small and couldn’t quite reach the name. I was tall for my age and she asked me to help her. So there I am holding the paper as she rubs. The name grew onto the page in a reverse of charcoal.
The burnt color surrounding the light of the name with the setting sun shining back at me from the wall. It was a moment in time forever locked in my brain.
It was then that I realized what the wall meant. It was then that my childish innocence about the safety of my world disappeared as quickly as the woman whose husband’s name I had just embossed.
There are an infinite number of things wrong with war. Faulting those who fought the wars of history is totally wrong. The fault of war lives within all of us. Those who fought the wars were simply brave to sacrifice themselves to give us the chance to not have to face that guilty verdict. We owe them more than a day. We owe them respect.