In the den of our quiet home in a quiet part of the world, there's a certificate, framed, propped on one of the bookshelves in the den. I'm looking at it, this gray November morning. It isn't hard: I turn my head and there it is, about two feet to the left of where I sit writing this.
The certificate is from the local chapter of the Korean War Veterans Association, thanking me for a handful of columns I wrote 25 or so years ago about their efforts to get a Korean War memorial built. It's signed by the group's president, John Settle, a wonderful gentleman who was up on Chosin Reservoir when the Chinese came pouring across the Yalu in the icebox winter of 1950.
Frozen Chosin, the survivors called it. John's souvenir was a nasty case of frostbite, of which he was reminded every time the weather turned frigid. The bottom of his feet would knot up in hard little balls. It didn't sound like three rings of fun for him.
I'm guessing John's probably gone now, as are a lot of those vets I got to know. It's been almost three decades, after all, and none of them were young then.
But I'm looking at the certificate they gave me and thinking about them because today is Veterans Day, and also Armistice Day. I think of it as the latter because I'm a history nerd, and World War I -- four years of pointless slaughter on an industrial scale -- has for some reason always held a particular fascination for me. So the moment the armistice ending it went into effect, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, resonates.
In any event, on this day I always conflate remembrance of that war with saluting those who fought all our wars, or who wear or have worn the uniform. And I've taken to reposting something I wrote several years ago on this day, because it seems to sum it all up.
Here it is:
Every year on Veterans Day I go back there, in my mind. It's been 17 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 Veterans 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, 27 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 were men who'd seen and done things no human being should ever see or do, and they talked about those things only with the greatest reluctance. It was not that they didn't remember. It' was 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, once 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 and ladies. Thank you for you service, and for your example.
