By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — God help our Veterans. Yes, this is the day originally termed “Armistice Day,” November 11, 1918—when the Great War (World War I) ended. Many saw that horrifically bloody conflict (The United States entered in the final year, 1917, but our “doughboys” were bludgeoned in ditches like the Europeans and also choked on mustard gas) as but the prelude to Hitler, the Axis, and the cataclysmic World War II, 1939-45.
Fifty-nine million people, mostly civilians, died in that second inferno, including over 350,000 of our American servicemen and women. They died far away from homes and hearth, from bullets, stabbing, burning, torture, typhus, starvation, drowning. Not all were buried or even found.
The inconclusive Korean conflict followed on the fault lines of WWII, 1950-53. Later emerged the long disaster of Vietnam, 1960-73; several smaller but still very dangerous encounters and operations in places such as Grenada, Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia. The X and Y generations, untouched by conscription, have grown up watching video-wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on television, laptops, on cellular units.
This is Veterans’ Day—widely associated on cable TV with sales. It is also the day about which many people no longer know the history, the meaning, or even what it is.
It is the day when the theme of national service ought to be an actual concept in the minds of our young people and not just the theme of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is the day schools and hospitals (including veterans’ medical centers) remain easily subject to budget cuts while corporate greed remains further serviced by outrageous bailouts.
It is the day the soldier in Kabul doesn’t get good boots and armor from his government while the Dallas executive selects shoes and a fur on garnered on her government subsidy.
However difficult and challenging the world is today, we have already survived something that is unspeakably huge, and military historians know that the Allied victory over the Axis of Germany and Japan—a global conflagration that was about race as it was about anything else—was accomplished by a razor-thin margin. Though still engaged in two regional wars today, many Americans don’t know—have no concept—about what civilian sacrifice, rationing, women replacing men in the infrastructure—are all about.
Every day we should thank the veterans of our military. We should salute those from the Korean War—the one everyone forgets. We should continue to salve the wounds of our Vietnam veterans who were shamelessly humiliated and denied benefits and employment upon returning from a war they never conceived. We pray for our men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan and this has nothing to do with the calendar.
America, flawed, depressed, confused right now, is a survival kit nevertheless. From Ft. Hood in Texas to Garrison Heidelberg in Germany, may we learn the history and know what day this is.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer and author based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com