A Sky Full of Holes

Not everyone will make it to Taftville's Memorial Park tomorrow morning at 11 for their annual Veterans Day observance sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2122 and the American Legion Post 104. 

Holidays that are observed where they occur even if it’s in the middle of the week present their own challenges in terms of organization and attendance which is why shifting stuff to Mondays became popular but I’m glad we don’t do it for Veterans Day.  

But we'll miss you as we pause, if not exactly stop, and thank all of those who wear and have ever worn the uniform of any branch of our armed forces.

Some folks I know roll their eyes at some (okay, at a lot) of the things I write or say, and all I can do is smile, shake my head and suggest (mostly using my inside voice, I hope) that they attempt to do something anatomically difficult (though if successful, it might be the most productive endeavor some have been engaged in for years) in response. 

I hate to be difficult, although I am very good at it. I spent eight years serving my country in an Air Force uniform defending freedom of speech and on occasion I insist on exercising a little of it for myself as well.

Tomorrow is not Memorial Day-we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present. When I was a kid, it was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of The World War, which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War Two. 

I'm never sure what lesson I should be learning when I realize just about the only things we seem to number with Roman numerals anymore are world wars and Super Bowls, though I am happy that there are so many more Super Bowls. 

Many nations across the globe, including our neighbor to the north, Canada, call tomorrow Remembrance Day and there's a part of me that likes that title a great deal because I think about all those with whom I served while in uniform and for those decades afterward as a Department of Defense civilian.  

We have a day when we recall those in uniform who gave their lives for our country, Memorial Day, and I have always appreciated the idea of a separate day set aside to honor everyone's service. One of the traditions of Veterans Day observances is the moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 when the Armistice that ended World War One was signed.  

We had people serving in the military before we even had a country. After all, geographically as well as historically this is where the American Revolution started with farmers and shopkeepers grabbing muskets and forcing the world's most powerful nation at that time, the British Crown, after a profuse flow of blood, to concede to the inevitable and allow all those up and down the Eastern Seaboard to become the United States of America (not that we've always been that ever since or even are that on most days in recent memory).

At any given moment, many of those in uniform serving down the block or across a continent can be called upon to run towards whatever danger we, as a nation, face with no thought for themselves or their own families and loved ones. Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day and allow all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault they withstand.

It's a dangerous world with new ways of war but those making the sacrifice to protect us are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those at Forward Operating Bases marked with dots on maps of countries we cannot name but all who whet the blade of the sword they wield in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

And while it's hard sometimes to see the line from the Battle of Lexington to the traffic on New York's Lexington Avenue and from the farmers' fields, crowded urban landscapes, and the splendid isolation of wooded lowlands to the marbled halls of the seat of government in the District of Columbia, it's all a part of what every veteran made possible with their service.

We are more filled with self-doubt as a nation than at any time in the last six or more decades. There will always be light and dark, but we shall prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now, or then, in uniform who placed service over self, whenever and wherever that is and was, thank you.

Sometimes we forget the very words we meant to say but as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude we will always be worthy of their sacrifice. 
-bill kenny