Veteran’s Day
I was born in the middle of World War II.
It was an exciting war. We knew what we were fighting for — the Nazis were evil, the Allies were good. We rationed and sacrificed. We went willingly to the fields of France and England to be maimed and die.
Then came the Korean War. We didn’t quite know what we were fighting for — something about a parallel line — nevertheless we went and died. America, after all, could not be wrong; we’d fought before on the right side. No one questioned our motives.
And then there was Vietnam. Something about showing Khrushchev who was in charge after the missile crisis in Cuba after the Bay of Pigs disaster. We weren’t quite so excited about the Viet Cong — we didn’t quite know what the threat to our land was. But boys and girls went, usually the poor kids, the Black and Hispanic kids, the Southern kids.
The services promised a way out of ghettos and dirt farms, and old men in suits — mostly white, mostly rich — played with charts and maps and body counts. Thousands and thousands came back in body bags. We stopped believing in patriotism in America, then we lost our innocence during the Vietnam War. We stopped believing in the good intentions of our government.
America has had a moral crisis ever since. So on Veterans Day, let us all apologize to those boys and girls who died and whose lives were ruined by the arrogance of a few white men in suits, by the apathy of many, and let us try again to love peace and the peacemakers among us. It is the least we can do for those kids.