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It's Veteran's Day, the day we reflect on the sacrifice and service of our men and women in uniform. We are now 90 years plus one since the guns stopped firing on the morning that ended World War I, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. It was dubbed by many as the war to end all wars. Of course, it wasn't.
In Europe, Nov. 11 is still remembered as Armistice Day. Here in the United States, Armistice Day became Veterans Day at the suggestion of President Eisenhower, the former allied commander in the Second World War.
That was 1954.
But the renaming of the day is symbolic, in a sense. This day, this anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, is commemorated very differently on each side of the Atlantic and across the borders of Europe. It's a reminder that not all "victors" experience wars in the same way, and that their citizens can have almost as much difficulty as those of the vanquished states in coping with the collective trauma of conflict.
For Americans, Veterans Day celebrates survivors of all the nation's 20th and 21st century wars --all veterans of all wars and their families.
In France and Britain, by contrast, the mood is altogether more somber. In these countries, it is the dead who, since 1919, have been the focus of the ceremonies.
If you ask anyone what really caused the First World War, you're likely to draw a blank --at best, you might get that tale of an Austrian archduke shot in his car in Sarajevo in June 1914. There are images, too, from movies and books of the horrors of trench warfare, the colossal waste of human life in one catastrophic, peristaltic battle after another. In parts of Europe, there also is a social and genetic memory of the war, caused by the loss of a generation of young men who left no heirs and had no bearing on the world that succeeded them.
I suppose the name change is one reason why so many Americans know so little about that first horrifying world war. Another reason, of course, is the passage of time. We are nearly as far now from the end of the Vietnam War as the year 1954 was from the end of World War I. And a third reason now, I think, is that we have never had to defend our own soil, or fight a war on our own soil.
The Great War, as the conflict is still known in France and Britain, was a prolonged and .jpg)
Australian soldiers at Ypres, 1917
Australian soldiers at Ypres, 1917
vicious struggle demanding the commitment of nations' wealth and manpower on an unprecedented scale. Over four years, armies millions of men strong clashed indecisively in horrendous conditions. For the first time on this scale, genuine home fronts formed, as civilians were targets of bombings and food blockades. British war losses, at more than 700,000 men, remain the heaviest in the country’s history. French and German dead were even greater, totaling 1.4 million and likely 2 million, respectively.
It was the need to come to terms with this immense loss of life that shaped European commemorations of Nov. 11. On the armistice's first anniversary in Britain, a two-minute silence was observed at 11 am, the time the fighting ended; industry was shut down, traffic halted and people across the country fell quiet to remember the nation's dead. In France, public grief was expressed more loudly, local communities gathering every armistice day to hear the names of the dead read out by a war orphan, and responding in unison, "mort pour la patrie" — "died for his country."
I think it's safe to say the psychological impact of that war has never left Europe and it might explain the pacifism or at least the aversion to war that exists on that continent --unlike here in the United States where we always seem so ready to go to war, carelessly, recklessly. It's ironic that the people who least like going to war in this country tend to be soldiers --not civilians.
Years ago a woman named Vera Brittain wrote a passionate memoir. She was an English writer, a feminist and pacifist, best remembered as the author of the best-selling 1933 memoir, Testament of Youth. In it, she wrote:
We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence; our lives, our children's lives, will be rational, balanced and well-proportioned to exactly the extent that we recognize this fundamental truth. It may be that our generation will go down in history as the first to understand that not a single man or woman can now live in disregarding isolation from his or her world.
That is a hard truth to take in. Vera Brittain struggled with the things we still struggle with, especially ridding herself of the feeling that "what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us."
I think about this when I think about our veterans. Outside of token references like "Support the Troops" ribbons on our cars or the almost pedestrian "thank you for your service," we seem a step removed from the realities of war and those who fight them.
It seems only twice a year that we ask the question that all of us pretend to care about on Armistice Day and Memorial Day, but rarely on other days: How is society treating our veterans? If we haven't served, if we haven't sacrificed, if we are not a family with loved ones in service and in combat --right now, as we speak-- we don't ask that question enough.
With two wars and an economy in turmoil are veterans getting a raw deal?
We pay lip service but how is society and the government taking care of veterans who need help?
Resources are strapped. The demand has very much succeeded the estimates when we first went to war back in 2002 and 2003. The V-A, the Department of Labor and other organizations charged with insuring that veterans are taken care of are struggling.
Today there are over 2,000 veterans living on the streets of San Francisco --homeless.
Are you hopeful that this new administration will turn some of this around?
In a year or so, we're going to have a large number of Iraqi vets on the streets of America --some of them arrived at Fort Hood last night. I worry that we are in no way prepared as a mental health community to deal with the fallout that we're going to face with returning veterans. It's an alarming circumstance and one that almost leaves the psychiatric community overwhelmed. It's a real warning. We're nearing the end of our Iraqi engagement and it doesn't appear we have the mental health facilities to deal with the many returning veterans who will be scarred by their experiences.
We have now a professional army. These are not draftees. These are individuals who make a decision to join the military as a professional choice. They're taught high tech warfare. They're good at it. They are sent to a place like Afghanistan. They are told to represent the security interests of their country and to assist the Afghan people while protecting America's national security interests.
They watch the men and women with whom they've bonded in combat blown up by IEDs placed by some of the very people they're sent there to help. They survive a tour with this horror after being told they're representing the national security interests of their country while helping the people that are trying to blow them up --that gets a little thin after a while. So they cycle out and come home and sort of get back on an even keel only to be sent back again for the same thing, the same phenomenon, cycle out, come home, only to cycle through again. Some of these troops are on their third and fourth deployment.
We are not ready for the psychological damage that such deployment does to troops. This is not Parisians throwing roses at the troops marching through the Arc de Triumph. These are not cheering crowds in Times Square.
What's happening here is that the people you're trying to help are trying to kill you and you begin to wonder what your country is doing there since they don't appear to want us there. When you get cycled in three, four and five times, you get some idea of what going through a wringer is really like.
Now that we have gone from a war president to a president who has inherited a war and may well become a war president, I wonder if you ponder these questions much, and whether your view of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed over the last seven years, and whether your opinion of the idea of going to war is different than what it was in say, 2002 or 2003.
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