| The following column was republished in The River Reporter on November 11, 1999. |
By Bert S. Feldman
The Recusant Reporter
"The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what we did here.
- Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg
On the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour, in 1918, the artillery and machine guns fell silent, and in the land lying between the trenches, redolent with the stink of death, a small bird on the barbed wire was heard to chirp. The first world war was over.
America, whose troops had been in the trenches only for a year and a half, lost 53,513 men. France, Britain, and Germany, after four years in the trenches, had lost many more. In the 1916 battle at Verdun, France, battle deaths alone had exceeded two million soldiers.
The men who went home, crippled, blinded, and gassed, were unnumbered. Man, that ingenious animal, had developed new and better ways to kill each other: airplanes, barbed wire, machine guns, explosive artillery shells, tanks, and poison gas. Even the men who came home whole were often scarred — in their minds.
When I was a kid, November 11, marking the order of cease fire, was known as Armistice Day, and at 11:00 a.m. everybody stopped and observed a minute of silence. After the end of World War II, the "big Deuce," it was decided that it would be impractical to start commemorating an additional two days of wars’ ends.
Memorial Day, also known as Decoration Day, paid tribute to those men and women who gave of their lives so that this country would remain free. It was the proper thing to do. So Armistice Day was renamed Veterans’ Day to honor those who returned home.
And the number of veterans grew steadily. There was another conflict in Korea, an interminable war in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and so-called police actions in such places as Somalia, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
The men and women who served in all of these actions or wars were profoundly marked for life. Those who returned had the course of their lives interrupted. College educations were provided for veterans, but it was hard for someone who had tasted a bit of Hell and was 26 to be in a freshman class with 18-year-old "kids" fresh out of high school.
At age 26 or so, it is time to settle down, get a job, get married, or raise a family. So schooling often was skipped.
And many had troubled sleep as well, as dreams of death in the jungle, children set afire, destroyed homes and the like ravaged their nights.
If you think that time heals all wounds, next Fourth of July, watch when the fireworks are set off after dark. I have seen it; watch how many observing the show flinch a bit when the whistle of an ascending rocket sounds off.
Veterans — derived for the Latin word veteranus, or "old" — aren’t any different than the rest of us who never left home. But when, at an early age, you have sipped water from the River Styx on the shores of Hell, your outlook on life is a bit different.
