Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Veterans

My father, who would have been 80 years old today, was born on what was then still "Armistice Day," and when the utter carnage of the then-"Great War" was still fresh on everyone's mind. Today, naturally, he's much on my mind, and I raise a glass to him.

Only a severe leg injury on guard duty saved Dad from being torn up on some hellhole of a South Pacific beach. (Which made me almost glad, and hardly dismayed, for his resulting phlebitis in my childhood years, as without that I wouldn't have been here.) He served out that next and far bigger war handling traffic as a U.S. Navy radioman in Hawaii, while nearly all his close friends died in a score of outposts around the planet.

Every generation is "great," and we'll defer to other fora the matter of whether their blood-tithe was strictly necessary ... but I have to salute my father's (and mother's) generation for making it through, coming back home, and being productive, despite what they had endured.

Do you have much to remind you about whether we're at any kind of "real" war now? Well, we are, however much the full destruction is hidden behind the daily news. And without any genuine clarity of aim or much visible cost ... since we should be seeing every flag-draped coffin coming home, and not the few who make it past the P.R. spinners.

Yet apart from the stomping on domestic freedoms ('twas ever thus), this really ain't at all like The War, as my folks pronounced it with initial caps. Something else else to still appreciate, by relative contrast.

Let's all hope we make it through at least a few more years without having to haul those capital letters out again. Or the biggest and nastiest of the weapons. Our smaller ones are doing carnage enough, and I want my generation and the one following to also come home and resume being productive.

Because the last thing we should want, as we put out the poppies or grave flowers on Veterans' Day, is to have any more of a need for making more veterans.

Amen, Grey, amen.

<Because the last thing we should want, as we put out the poppies or grave flowers on Veterans' Day, is to have any more of a need for making more veterans. >

Once again you tell it like it is Grey.

I was horrified today that the people I was working for didn't organise a two minute silence at 11am - not sure if this is also done in other countries but here in UK it's quite a big thing as a mark of respect. My son asked me a few years ago how a total anti-war person like myself always insists on buying poppies (again - is that just a UK thing?) and ruthlessly enforced the two minute silence if the 11th was on a day we were at home - trying to explain that while war is, to my mind, evil, respect (and also financial support via poppies etc) for those that have fallen and those that were damaged and those left behind were opposite ends of the spectrum. Explaining to him how young many of the poor boys who died were, how many widows and orphans were left afterwards must have affected him - he bought two poppies this year and has been wearing them!

It's a bit worrying that in todays polarised political/religious climate how many people don't seem to understand what previous generations went through or fought for.

My father will be 81 if he lives to his birthday on February 21st. He is currently in a care center suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and is oblivious of the world around him. However, if he gets the opportunity to discuss it, he can go for hours and hours about the history of Portland, Oregon, and about his experiences in World War II. My father was an infantryman in the US Army. He did not wait to be drafted. As soon as he graduated from high school, he enlisted. He served active duty in the European Theater from 1943 through the end of the war, and then came home and remained in the Army Reserves for another eleven years. During World War II he fought in Germany, France, and Belguim. He had a previously untapped gift for languages and was able to pick up German easily. (Perhaps due to practically growing up with his best friend who happened to be the son of a prominent Jewish physician. They spoke German in their home, and maybe dad's subconscious stored this information.) Dad was a medic, and was proud of the fact that he could communicate with the injured prisoners of war, and the people in the cities and countrysides as they made their way around chasing the Nazi's. Dad was always proud of the fact that he was so trustworthy and squeeky clean that he was entrusted with the medications for his particular group (not sure what this was called) and specifically the lot of 5,000 tablets of morpheine they were to dole out as pain medication. Many medics dipped into the supply to numb their own psychic pain, and dad never did that. Nor did he sell it on the black market, as he knew others did. (Irronically, later in life my father did abuse prescription pain killers and muscle relaxants for his unspecified combination of aches and pains for forty years.) When I was a little girl I used to watch war movies with my father, and as we viewed the horror of war, it was the only time he would open up and talk about it. I learned about the mechanics of war and about the differences between branches of service and about the major battles and the time line of the war through these movies. My father also had a wonderful sense of humor about the war and grabbed onto anything that could give him that sense of comraderie with his buddies and not focus on the death and pain. He loved Phil Silvers in Sergeant Bilko, and Gomer Pyle USMC, and Hogan's Heroes, and in particular, MASH.

I could go on and on......

My father taught me what it means to be a responsible citizen and a patriot. When I was growing up my father was my role model for strength and service and sacrifice. My father taught me to salute the flag and to understand what you are saying when you recite the Pledge of Alligence and to thank our veterans from every conflict. My father was a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. He held the office of chaplain for years and years in each. He spoke to community groups about what it was like to serve in World War II, and he was a guest speaker in classrooms from grade school through college on occasion.

Steve, thanks for starting this thread so I could think about my father today, and honor he and all veterans.

Harbi, poppies are very popular here, probably more common than in Britain. Stems from the fact that "In Flanders Fields" was written by a Canadian Dr. John MacRae.

I was at a service at City Hall today. I'm glad that most of us here see it as an occasion not to glorify war but to glorify the peace built upon our soldiers' sacrifice. As our mayor said, "What a monument this city where people from many places: eat and work together; listen to the same radio stations; fall in love and live in peace; is to their sacrifice."

It was as political as I've seen a Rememberance Day service, which is not surprising given the situation in the world. Both the Mayor and the Anglican Bishop (in his prayer) said some not so thinly veiled things about world politics. A line from the day's prayer, "Lord deliver us from those who use easy excuses to make us seem righteous, noble and just." summed up their mood.

Then I got back inside I turned on CNN just in time to see a diatribe against "Revisionist History".