Veteran's Day

I am not a veteran. My mother is a veteran. My father is a veteran. A fair number of the people I know and love are veterans and this day, whatever it means to them, means a lot to me.

When I was a teenager, the war in Vietnam was still going on as was the Draft and, as I neared the age of my majority, I made a decision that when and if my number was called I would answer. Not because I believed in the war...I most certainly did not...but rather because I was young and despite all of its faults I believed that it was my country...right or wrong...and thus if it were at war and called me to uniform I had to answer. (To be honest, the idea of being plopped onto the killing fields of Southeast Asia scared the hell out of me...and, then as now, I wasn't sure that killing "the enemy" was something that I would find easy to do. But, of course, it's not supposed to be easy...all life is sacred and taking it, even and especially in the cause of war, is supposed to be the hardest thing imaginable if we have even the barest hint of a soul.)

My mother...a veteran herself as I said...vehemently opposed the idea of me going to that war, a folly that she thought not worth my blood nor the blood of all of the young people that Walter Cronkite somberly enumerated every day on the CBS Evening News.

The conflict between us on this point became moot when the US pulled out of Vietnam when I was 17 years old. I cannot say that I was disappointed by this turn of events...both for myself and for my country and the young people who would no longer have to die so very far away from home.

I am not a veteran...but I am a patriot (both cynically and optimistically...however frustrating it can, has, and will be, this is still as much my country as it is the country of anyone in the far right...or the far left...who might want to mold it into their own myopic image) and I tip my hat to those who have served in uniform on this day...and every other day.