Veterans Day arrival takes time for some of us to digest, to ponder, to meditate on, trying to qualify thought vs. emotion. And certainly it deserves the time and analysis that takes.
We simply should be better prepared for that World War I commemoration: “the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Some people get that date tangled up with Memorial Day, a Civil War remembrance first observed on May 28, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. It was called Decoration Day, and always observed when I was a kid.
Veterans Day is the day set aside to thank and honor all those who served honorably in the military – in wartime or peacetime. In contrast to Memorial Day, Veterans Day is largely intended to thank living veterans for their service, to acknowledge that their contributions to our national security are appreciated, and to underscore the fact that all those who served – not only those who died – have sacrificed and done their duty.
But by now – after 12 years of constant war – a “thank you for your service,” while welcome, has become such a cliche that has worn a little pale for some people. Nonetheless, it‘s better than nothing as a recognition of service. But sadly, for many folks, it seems clear that American civilians and their military are drifting apart. Part of this, with bitter irony, is caused by the “false war” declared and aggressively carried out by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraq War is now widely seen to have been conjured up using false “evidence” that Saddam Hussein possessed material for the production of the now-infamous “weapons of mass destruction” – that were later proved not to have existed.War in Afghanistan had its roots in the arrival there of Osama Bin Laden, who had been forced to leave the Sudan in August 1996. He founded the Al-Qaeda in late 1980 to support the mujahdeen’s war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Bin Laden became disillusioned by in-fighting between warlords, and became close with Mullah Omar. Thus, he moved Al-Qaeda’s operations, especially terrorist training camps, to eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. 9/11 commission reportedly found that under the Taliban, Al-Qaeda was able to use Afghanistan as a place to train and indoctrinate fighters, import weapons, coordinate with other jihadists and plot terrorist actions. It also supported training camps of other organizations. An estimated 20,000 men passed through these facilities before 9/11, most of them sent to fight for the Taliban against the more liberal United Front of Ahmad Shah Massoud. A smaller number were inducted into Al-Qaeda.
A series of attacks had occurred August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at U.S. embassies in the East African cities of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and brought Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Al-Qaeda, their terrorist organization, to the attention of the U.S. public. It also resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation placing Bin Laden on its ten most wanted fugitives list. The FBI also connected the attack to Azerbaijan by tracing 60 calls regarding the strike placed via satellite phone by Bin Laden to associates in the country’s capital Baku.
A good many members of the U.S. military sent to fight in Afghanistan knew some, or much, of this history, if not the details.
The drift has been thoughtfully examined in a recent New York Times op-ed piece by Karl Eikenberry (a retired U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2005-2007, U.S. ambassador there 2009-2011, and now a fellow at Stanford), and David M. Kennedy (a Stanford emeritus professor of history). They assert that America’s greatest military “challenge” is the widening gap between the nation’s people and their armed forces. They point to three developments creating this distancing. The first is the end of conscription and the move to a large all-volunteer standing army. Less than one-half of one percent of the population serves today, compared to 12 percent in World War II. Among “the elites,” they say, diminution of service has fallen even more. Seventy percent of Congress had some military service in 1972; just 20 percent do now. The second problem is that technological advances such as drones, “distance us from our war-time decisions, and breed complacency about the use of force,” and its international consequences. The third development is the “move to non-traditional military roles such as nation-building.”
Eikenberry and Kennedy point out that these developments mean that the American people have a “maximally powerful force operating with a minimum of citizen engagement and (most importantly) comprehension.” They recommend that we unlimber George Washington’s maxim: “When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.” They suggest a draft lottery, reintroducing the notion of service as a civic obligation. Such a lottery would be activated when volunteer recruitments came up short, and would be “weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled.” This would provide an “incentive for the most privileged among us to pay greater heed to military matters.” They also suggest the renewal of the Total Force Doctrine, which was unwisely dumped. It called for a “large-scale call-up of the Reserves and the National Guard at the start of any large, long deployment.” Stand-by forces usual contain older men and women, rooted in their communities; their mobilization would serve as a brake on going to war that would disrupt their communities in ways that sending only the standing Army does not. These two experts also get Congress into it. But with present Congressional misbehavior, a lot of people wouldn’t send anybody in the U.S. legislature to the corner store for a can of beer, much less to renovate the defense of the nation.
True, that appears an overreach. But just trying to take the present Congress seriously is onerous for a lot of people, including not a few vets. And when November 11 rolled around that commemoration day rightfully made a good many people take a mental and emotional step back from their daily routines. It made one think of the twin flag raising at Iwo Jima, and then of the flag that graced a 1998 Steven Spielberg film about World War II. It looked, said film reviewer Richard Schickel of Time Magazine, “… old ... thin, faded, antique, like the unambiguous emotions it used to stir in an age less given to irony and selfishness than our own.”
In “Saving Private Ryan,” Spielberg’s gently moving flag is the introduction to the chaotic, death-crammed, unforgiving D-Day invasion of Hitler’s fortified European wall. The opening 15-20 minutes of this brutal effort to gain a foothold on the narrow sands of Omaha Beach has been acclaimed as “the best battle scene of all time.” But its realism turned away both many civilians unused to much blood and death, but also many combat vets of World War II and Vietnam.
Yet many (including Spielberg fans and, yes, many vets) argue that such scenes are precisely what “professional civilians” who called for full-tilt war after 9/11 but did not “go,” should study well. At the same time, post traumatic stress disorder counselors advised at the time that “more psychologically vulnerable” veterans avoid watching that part of the film. Dismayingly, many of those avid for the Iraq War (generally now seen as a shameful farce) side with those troglodytes that back legislation that cuts funding for the Veterans Administration and its wrestling match with the many conundrums of PTSD, and all other wounds of war.
But for that singular time last week devoted to veterans of all wars, attention was, or certainly should have been, focused on an easing of differences, and a thoughtfully generous recognition of just what war-time sacrifice means to those who have carried out the usually harsh and truly aw-ful tasks asked of them. Each of us should give such a moment more empathetic elasticity, stretching it a longer distance. But as many of these words illustrate, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Yet that’s no reason not to give it a truly patriotic try, demonstrating needed {human} inventiveness toward veterans and with them in mind toward one another.