On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Great War finally ended, a conflict unlike any that had come before.  The following year, President Wilson celebrated “Armistice Day” for the first time, and seven years later Congress declared November 11 an official holiday to honor the veterans of that cataclysmic conflict. 

The name of the holiday was changed in 1954, when a law was passed designating November 11 a day to honor all war veterans, not just those who had served in World War I.  On this Veterans Day, ninety years after the guns fell silent in Flanders fields, we honor the men and women of America who have served in far too many conflicts since then.

We honor Frank Buckles, the last remaining American veteran of the Great War.  Perhaps it was Mr. Buckles whom F. Scott Fitzgerald was thinking of when he imagined the reflections of a nervous soldier preparing for the long passage to European battlefields:

We leave tonight…

        Silent, we filled the still, deserted street,

                A column of dim grey,

And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat

        Along the moonless way;

The shadowy shipyards echoed in the feet

        That turned from night and day.

And so we linger on the windless decks,

        See on the spectre shore

Shades of a thousand days, poor grey-ribbed wrecks…

        Oh, shall we then deplore

Those futile years!

                See how the sea is white!

The clouds have broken and the heavens burn

To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light

The churning of the waves about the stern

        Rising to one voluminous nocturne,

                        We leave tonight.

We honor John Ausland, who took advantage of a brief moment of solitude to write a letter to his mother and father during a rare lull in the Battle of the Bulge:

 Dear Folks,                         Somewhere in Germany, December 5, 1944

It is too bad that there is not time to write to you from day to day when we are fighting. As Dad can verify, it would make a picture that you all at home would refuse to believe.  For it is beyond description.  However, these images are so well impressed on my mind that I'm afraid they will never be erased, should I so desire... 

Outside the night is clear, star-lit, and thus far moonless. A lone Jerry plane buzzes overhead. Over our heads and to the flanks the artillery rumbles.       

Tomorrow at 0730 I shall have been in Europe six long months.  Six months of days, hours, and minutes.  Each at times an eternity.  Now I wonder how many more of each of these this will continue. And how long a man can go on with it.  The beach, Cherbourg, Periers, St. Lo, Mortain, Paris, the Siegfried Line, and now Germany. Each fight seems harder than the last.         

Strangely, though, I feel better now than after any fight thus far.  After the others I've been quite run down. Today, after a bath, haircut, shave, and change of clothes, I feel quite good.  Perhaps I'm becoming battle-hardened.  I hope not.  Yet the dead and wounded have less and less effect. War has become a business…   

We honor Bill Jones, a young man who found new appreciation for the faith of his fathers when he was taken prisoner by North Koreans at Taejon.  He was captured after a bullet scraped his skull, barely missing penetration into the brain.  Mr. Jones recalled that 1950 incident in an interview 55 years later: 

There were two of us taken together in a rice paddy, and then a few minutes later, the North Koreans brought over two more American soldiers.  My friend said to me, 'What do we do now?'  So, I thought, Maybe we should pray.  He said “I'm not usually a very religious person”, but both of us dropped to our knees and said the Lord's Prayer.  In a few minutes, the North Koreans came over and shot the other two Americans.  I'm not certain if the prayer saved us, but I'll always believe that there was someone watching over us that day.  They walked us for days to the north, and we finally got to our first prison camp.  I wasn't released for over three years.   

We honor Major Dale Buis, the first of 58,256 names carved on Maya Lin’s gut wrenching black wall on Washington D.C.’s mall.  We honor the other men and women who served in Vietnam, whose experiences, both during the war, and after their return home, were beautifully captured by Bobbie Ann Mason in her novel, In Country.  Her teenaged protagonist finds the war diary written by the father she never knew, a young man tragically killed before he could see his baby girl.  He describes his first enemy encounter after weeks of boredom and drudgery:

July 9.  Ambushed.  It was over in two seconds but seemed like two hours.  My knees still shaking.  Bobby G. got hit in the leg, but not bad.  Doc patched him up.  We got two V.C.  I think one of ‘em’s mine, but Jim C. claimed it too.  We had a big day, big deal over whose it was.  No letters.  Irene seems too far away to be real.  But it’s all for her and the baby, or else why are we here?  Joe’s got 5 notches on his machetty.  He’s a short-timer.  I’m sure I’ll get one soon.  It’s the law of averages.  Joe’s asking for trouble, though.  He’ll volunteer to walk point.  He ain’t afraid of nothing…I’m tired tonight.  A good kind of tired.  We got two.  Two weeks out and we finally got two.  We had cigarettes and felt wild.  

We honor the men and women who have served more recently, some in conflicts nearly forgotten.  They served, and died, in places like Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama; in Bosnia and Kosovo, and in the anarchy of Somalia.  In the Persian Gulf they sailed aboard the USS Cole, easy targets for a bomb-laden dingy foreshadowing more horror to come.   

We honor the men and women who fought and died in far off Iraq in 1991, and again in our new century.  We honor those in Afghanistan, whose mission is to destroy the entity that destroyed so much on American soil seven years ago.   We honor those who remain in those sad and faraway lands, who live in the path of unimaginable peril every day.  Godspeed to them; may they come home safely, and well. 

One day soon, may the wars end.  Then we will read and ponder anew the words of Thomas Hardy, written at the time of that first Armistice Day 90 years ago: 

Breathless they paused.  Out there the men raised their glance                  To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped.                                     As they had raised it through the four years’ dance                                   Of Death in the now familiar flats of France,                                          And murmured, “Strange, this!  How?  All firing stopped?”                    

Aye, all was hushed.  The about-to-fire fired not,                                    The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.                                       One cheekless regiment slung a clinched shot                                         And turned.  The Spirit of Irony smirked out, “What?                            Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?” 

Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,                                           No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,                                          No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;                                   Worn horses mused:  “We are not whipped today”;                                No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn. 

Calm fell, from Heaven distilled a clemency;                                         There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;                                Some could, some could not, shake off misery;                                          The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”                                             And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”