Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 7:26:53 AM
TORONTO (November 11, 2008) -- Today we observe the day honouring our Veterans. We use different names for our observed day: Remembrance Day here in Canada; Armistice Day in Britain; Veterans Day in the USA. Some of us know why the decent people stop what they are doing on the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month at 11:00 a.m. We whose parents went to World War II know that this was the date and the time that World War I -- The Great War, the War To End Wars -- came to its official end. There is one soldier left in Canada who was there; he was 15 years old when he convinced the recruiters he was old enough and went away to the War. He is 108 today. (Today the constabulary and most parents consider 15 year olds to be toddlers. Think about it.) Britain has 3 old soldiers still among them, ranging from 110-112 years of age, who must have done the same. In those days young men were not only proud but eager to serve their country and they knew why it had to be done.
Many of our fathers, or grandfathers, and our uncles, cousins and other relatives went off to World War II. My sainted Daddy was 22 when he signed up; he told us he weighed only 98 lb. (life on a Depression-era farm with 11 brothers and sisters and a father who believed that boys existed to be worked until they dropped was like that) but the doctor winked at him and wrote down 105 so he could pass the physical. Six of the boys signed up: Jerry, Albert, Harold, Jim, Douglas and Lee. They ranged in age from 25 to 19 and every one of them was eager to serve. (This week I have observed a horde of brats on the grass at Queens Park, the same age as those brave young men and women, bawling for the gubmint not to make them pay back their college loans because they didnt learn anything that can get them a job even in a good economy.) Young men, and some young women too, who had their whole lives ahead of them, who had never left the farm and who in most cases had not finished even the grades at the two-room prairie schoolhouses where the big boys went when farm work allowed, signed up and shipped out and laid everything on the line for people they did not know and would never meet, because those people needed them and because many of those soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and the nurses and support teams that went with them knew that if Hitler wasnt stopped where he was, he would be stomping his jackboots across Main Street USA and Krystalnacht would come to the streets of New York. Daddy and his brothers were Jews. Some of the military who went from the USA were Japanese and Germans who loved their new country (in which many were actually born). Some were Navajo and Oneida Indians who dropped their grudges and picked up their rifles. Some were consciencious objectors who picked up stretchers and medical bags and dived under withering fire to save comrades and fellow soldiers and anybody else that needed their aid. Some of them came home -- Daddy and all his brothers did -- and many more lie in cemeteries in Cambridge, in New Zealand and Australia and France and in Flanders Fields, and too many lie in unknown places, known but to God. Daddy came home with stories and photographs that he showed us when we turned 12 years old, photos he took and smuggled out, of the concentration camp he went to as a driver for the officers who supervised the awful task of dealing with the inhumanity of man to man. He told us that the day would come when people would say that such things never happened at all. *Your Daddy saw these things,* he said. *And now you have seen them too.* (Many years later my sister and I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and upon returning we were describing what we saw there. When we mentioned the pile of childrens shoes, my youngest boy, who was about 6 at the time, interrupted. *Hitler killed CHILDREN?* he said in consternation. *What did the children do wrong?* Steven is 21 today and I am still answering that question.
Later genrations went off to smaller wars -- Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and as UN support troops to Lebanon and Africa. Some were killed; some returned home different in many ways. Every one of them went because they loved their country and knew that people are people and deserve defence from horrors that they devoutly hope will never come to their own home towns. (When they came home, a lot of the rising generation of toddlers spat on them and called them filthy names, under the tutelage of the ignorant and evil. Some, like my younger sister, came to understand what a monstrous evil this was -- in seeing the killing fields of Laos and Cambodia and realizing what her stupid chanting and marching had really caused, she repented in dust and ashes. I am sure she was not alone.)
Today as we celebrate the end of the first Great War, squads of cadets and old soldiers guard the Cenotaphs in Ontario from those who last year filmed themselves urinating on these memorials to men their own age who never returned to their much-beloved *home and native land* -- and who did so in the belief and knowledge that there was something here worth preserving. Those who saw the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11/01 and who went off to war as their grandfathers had done after Pearl Harbour was attacked, and those who have already forgotten that anything happened on that day, but can remember everyone who competed in the last round of Dancing with the Stars ... our fathers and grandfathers, our uncles and great-uncles, fought for that generation too. And God bless the members of that generation who listened and who listen to the stories these old soldiers tell and take them to heart for the day when they too will have to stand up and be counted.
My Daddy died October 7, 2008, and he had a military funeral because at an age when he had everything to lose, he laid it all on the line for his country. At the end of the ceremony a young soldier presented Mama with a folded flag *with the thanks of a grateful country.* Mama said that she prayed Daddy could see that moment. He would, she said, have burst his buttons with pride.
God bless and save all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines this day and every day. And God give the indifferent and the hostile and those who believe we can surrender our way to Peace, the wisdom and good sense, and the kick up the backside, they need to raise their understanding of just what we remember on Remembrance Day....