The humility of service

(I wrote this today for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, my old hang, because it's Veteran's Day and therefore the right time to take a timeout from Sportsball World for saner matters. Please pick up a copy or go the online version today, because local journalism matters more than ever in these unhinged times, and if it goes away no one will be left to keep tabs on the rascals among us. Here's the link to subscribe. Do it today.) 

Every year on Veteran's Day I go back there, in my mind. It's been 16 years now since I toured the American sector of the Western Front in France, but on this day it always feels like I can reach out and touch it. It feels as near as my next breath.

These days, in that place where American boys fought and died in the autumn of 1918, there are neat green cemeteries from the Argonne to Thiaucourt, row upon row of white crosses arrayed in the geometry of remembrance. And, amid fields of wheat and the crumbling remains of ancient pillboxes, there is an immense dome of gleaming white marble.

Built in 1931 atop an escarpment called Montsec, it commands what was the old St. Mihiel salient, and now is just quiet French farmland. But though it commemorates the first major American operation of the Great War, hardly any Americans ever visit, or perhaps know it exists.

I always wonder why that is so, when I think of that place on Veteran's Day. And I always will.

It's an old bromide that we can never thank our veterans enough for their service, and yet somehow we always fall short. If we remember what they did for us in Normandy or Fallujah or on Iwo Jima or Okinawa, we just as readily forget sometimes what they did in Belleau Wood or Frozen Chosin or the killing fields of the Ia Drang Valley. And, more shamefully, we especially forget when they return home.

I met my share of veterans, in my four decades as a journalist. I met Korean veterans and Vietnam veterans and, once, 26 years ago in the living room of a modest home near Georgetown Square, a vet who survived both Tarawa and Okinawa in World War II. 

I also met a man who, when he was 23 years old, was shooting down Nazi jets over Europe in a P-51 Mustang. His name was Chuck Yeager, and perhaps you've heard about what he did later on, something involving the sound barrier. 

In all cases, they are men who've seen and done things no human being should ever see or do, and they talked about those things only with the greatest reluctance. It is not that they didn't remember. It's that they were unfailingly polite, and didn't wish to burden us with old fantastical tales. 

I guess it felt too much to them like bragging about things no one should ever brag about.

Everyone who has ever experienced war in closeup knows how true that is. They leave the bragging to fools and charlatans who, when it was their turn to serve, hid under their beds. One of them, a swaggering gasbag of no particular merit, famously mocked a decorated Vietnam War POW for being captured. 

I won't think about him today. I'll think instead about the no-big-deal humility of Chuck Yeager, and the quiet dignity of the Korean War vets I met a quarter century ago, and of so many other men and women of so much more quality and consequence.

Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for you service, and for your example.