EVERY DAY, we should CELEBRATE and APPRECIATE our military ... Thank you, Elijah Murphy for posting this ... and for your service. I was lucky enough to walk among heroes. A friend of mine wrote this for the local paper. Veteran’s Day, A Veteran’s Perspective Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die. G.K. Chesterton I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. General Dwight D. Eisenhower Another Veteran’s Day is upon us, banks and government facilities close for a day off. But there is someone who never gets a day off. That is the veteran who has suffered the ravages of war and came home to a parade, a thank you, and all sorts of changes in his life. Three years ago, on Veteran’s Day, we lost one such man who suffered greatly after Vietnam. His lungs were burnt and he had to live with it because there was no going back, that man was Mike Parrish. I knew Mike for several years before his less than timely demise, and found myself wrangled into a writing position (I did not say J-O-B) that allows me to express myself at least in print thanks to Mike. I am still gonna hafta settle up with Mike when we meet up on Fiddler’s Green. Mike was a fellow veteran and a man I admired. What started out as picking up the slack for him turned into holding down the fort until I decide otherwise. Almost every day I still think about “That Damn Parish”. So what does Veteran’s Day mean to a veteran? I cannot say for every other veteran but for this one it is a day to contact my brothers in arms and say howdy and reminisce a little and keep up on the score card of how many of “us” are left. We reminisce about other brothers from different mothers and wonder why. Why some of us get to go before others and why others just won’t go…. I drag out pics and look at myself with long hair doing not so super secret spy stuff and pics of me with the other guys, doing the stuff we did. I think of the war stories from my mentors, many of whom I have lost track of and wish that I hadn’t. I remember little poems and sayings, a poem I found in Germany, written by a German soldier near the end of the big one kinda of summed up what it was to be a soldier and a brother in arms. The translated poem goes “When one of us is tired, the other will for him watch. When one of us wants to doubt, the other will knowingly laugh. When one of us shall fall, the other shall stand for two. Then every fighter has a God, with his Comrade by his side.” Herybert Menzel, 1944 (1906 - 1945). At the end of the war, most soldiers would rather sit down and share a beer rather than continue the path that they took through the war. In fact, most soldiers would trade with their enemies when given the opportunity. I remember stories of soldiers on the Fulda Gap in Germany who would trade goods and stuff back and forth through the fence. You would leave something at a spot on the fence and the next day something else would be there, a pack of cigarettes might fetch you some East German uniform insignia. A trip through “the Corridor” from West Berlin to West Germany would almost always result in the swap of cigarettes or insignia at the checkpoints. Funny how that worked, governments were enemies of each other, soldiers just wanted a four day pass. I recall stories from friends who survived, against insurmountable odds, I recall the Medal of Honor recipient who re-enlisted me on a mountainside, I recall the good, the bad, and the indifferent and the fellow soldiers with whom I sweated and bled, and remember that at the moment of truth we were there to fight for each others’ lives so we could get home to what we were fighting for. I remember the movies I have seen through the years that sometimes accurately portray, and sometimes inaccurately portray an event. Like the recent movie “Lone Survivor” that all but ignored the unsung heroes who marched up the mountain to rescue the captive SEAL. But I think one of the best articles ever written about Veteran’s Day was written by a former commander of mine. This is what the Colonel had to say about Veteran’s Day. “Veterans Day means a lot to some, a little to others, nothing to many, and is often confused with Memorial Day by most. While it is a day to honor those men and women who served in this nations military, it is how the veteran perceives this day that might surprise those who, for one reason or another, never wore their countrys uniform. There are two distinct groups of veterans: those who served a tour in the military and then left to pursue civilian life, and those who chose the military as a profession and remained until retirement. While service to ones country can often be a life-altering event for either group, I have found that it is the military retiree whose metamorphosis is most complete. Those who serve and elect to return to civilian life are still basically who they were before they entered military service. There are exceptions of course, but those who return to civilian pursuits are once again the teacher, the mechanic, the professional business person and easily integrated back into society as a member of a civilian community. The person that retires from active duty has no such identity, very rarely has ties to any civilian community and has learned a hard lesson that you make but very few close friends in the military. He is best defined not by who he was as a civilian but what he did in the military. It is the common thread that binds us all into that band of brothers that have stood for and with each other through indescribable experiences that defy understanding by those who were not witness to those events. The more elite and demanding the units in which the retiree served, the greater the loss of his connection to civilian identity because there is just no parallel personal or professional civilian category into which he easily fits. Things change over time, but over decades nothing is recognizable to most returning veterans. Many retirees chosen path is not akin to a job but rather an all-consuming profession requiring total commitment to each other, their unit and the mission incurring significant, and sometimes unimaginable, physiological, psychological and personal costs. Despite the portrayals in movies, there are no motivational sound tracks in the background and no glorious visions of striving for the greater good of God and country, just plain gut-wrenching emotions, pain, effort and selflessness to help each other get through to the next event. I find it amusing that many folks who wish to honor veterans or support the troops do so in blissful ignorance thinking that those of us that chose to serve stood on freedoms frontier at the behest of some ignominious military leader when the truth is that the military is the last card played by the politicians when all other elements of national power have failed. Civilians do not seem to understand that they have been stakeholders all along in the events experienced by veterans because of the very politicians that they have voted in or out of office. I have always thought that the best way to honor a veteran would be to have the entire Congress mustered on the veranda of Lees Mansion within Arlington National Cemetery. Standing there they can see Washington, D.C., but in the process they have to overlook the headstones of thousands of veterans lying in mute testimony to the folly of bad political decisions, political bickering and personal agendas. It is not the veteran who needs Veterans Day. For many of us the pride, the shadows, the pain and the tattered memories are with us every day. Veterans Day is really for everyone other than the veteran so they never forget that we are still walking among them trying to be part of their lives although we have all willingly spent a good portion of ours by taking up the torch for those who could not or would not serve.” Col Jack Maroney, Ret. All I can say is “Thanks Jack”, God rest you my brother. I shall remember you again on Memorial Day. In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. Mark Twain
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:51:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015