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November 11, 2004
Veterans Day
2000 (or close to it)2001
2002
2003
I can’t help seeing Veterans Day as a pendant to Memorial Day. It seems a lesser, or at least a less serious holiday, insofar as death is the most “serious” thing we know, and survival (one might think) should warrant a more joyous celebration. But it’s just the opposite: Memorial Day has become a big happy summer holiday while Veterans Day has shrunk like an old soldier, into a gray November day of not altogether brave remembrance. Memorial Day’s dead may have made the greater sacrifice, but it’s only the living who actively remember, and the real bitterness of war is best recalled by those who have actually seen it, and lived to tell the rest of us.
The dead tell us nothing, though as with scripture we may draw whatever inference from them we wish; dutiful soldiers, they will defend any position. Our living veterans are more contentious, and their stories are not cloaked in false glory. In my experience, they are not given to the kind of party line patriotic pabulum we too often hear in martial matters. Being in the military can have many effects on a person, but the ability to see through bullshit is notable among them. In this culture, that gift may be a curse, and while all vets are marked by their experience, it must be admitted that a significant number are damaged by it.
Others are ennobled. I mean that sincerely, though not without irony. The taste for war is deep in us, and we put so much of our cultural identity into it that something of what’s good in us must come out there. I’ve not been immune to battle’s charms: from Greek heroes to medieval knights to space-spanning comic book warriors of the future, I’ve patronized the shrine of many a god of war. But only in my imagination.
My mythic imagination.
I knew pretty early on that while I might like to play army, I didn’t really want to grow up to be in a war. The Park-focused lens of the Arboretum is my current charm against the power of the War God, but I do retain some sympathy for his worshipers, and I’m not above honoring our fighting men and women.
I’m thinking of the rank and file mainly; Veterans Day seems to me an enlisted man’s holiday, though I suppose officers and commanders are to be included. But while our foot soldiers may be seduced by myths of honor and duty, those who send them to the field have a greater responsibility, and have too often passed the poison of war down the chain of command. Witness our current adventure in Iraq, where top brass have blamed our prison atrocities on a few rogue soldiers, rather than on the very institution of War itself, which our administration has so heartily embraced, as if its inherent horrors could be dismissed as unintended side effects. Instead of accepting responsibility our leaders have blamed their own followers, and in so doing they dishonor this Day in practice, even as they pay endless lip service to “supporting the troops” while unilaterally extending tours of duty.
If our veterans are bitter in the face of such hypocrisy it’s an old story. War may fire our imaginations, but the story most often turns to tragedy, or the kind of comedy that forces a laugh in the face of tragedy. Tales of untarnished triumph are best suited to indoctrinating children and cowing trepidatious voters. That being done, the carnage can be blamed on its victims.
We are all War’s victims, and as I suggested in 2002, we are all veterans of a sort. That was specifically a post-9/11 sentiment, and meant as no slight to soldiers, but my refusal to privilege war is part of an effort to understand our innate equality, and all false promises of “security” aside, Life is always at risk.
I learned as much in 2000, when the trauma of attending on my father’s “peaceful” death distracted me from this holiday, the only time I’ve failed to come up with a post for an official occasion. Since then the holiday has gained moment, with war coming closer than we had been accustomed to. In 2001, a mere month after an act of war I stood within a few blocks of, the best I could do was to mount a montage reflecting my sense of the impending mobilization and its uncertain prospects. By 2003 uncertainty had coalesced into the current mess, and I documented a symbolic distress signal from the Park. A year later it’s a disappointment to have the current course endorsed by the electorate. The country is deeply divided, and much of the support is, I think, provisional, but America remains in thrall to martial mythology, at the expense of the human reality of veterans.