Better than a Birthday Parade

Today is Armed Forces Day and, unlike almost any other national observance, is not a big sales day at The Mall. Cynic that I am, let me note it's everyone who's ever been in the US armed forces who makes going to the mall possible for all of us. 

We have Veterans Day in November, and in less than two weeks, we'll observe Memorial Day (with lots of meat cooked over hot rocks and a five-hundred-mile left-turn-only oval road race), but Armed Forces Day is for anyone and everyone who ever wore the colors, past, present, and (the way the world is going), also the future.

We have huge numbers of highly-trained and well-motivated young men and women committed by my generation to a Global War on Terrorism whose successful outcome I would pray for, if I prayed, though I cannot tell you what such an outcome will look like (the Stars and Stripes flying over the restored sculptures in the Bamiyan Valley? A Mets game in Mecca?).

The dangers in which we have placed our children, and, for some of us, our grandchildren, has been a guns and butter war where real men and women suffer real losses while the rest of us watch our Chia pets grow on the kitchen windowsill.

In a half dozen and more locations around the globe, those in uniform have lost their lives in defense of the notions upon which we have built a nation. And for everyone who has died, close to a dozen have come home wounded either physically, psychologically, or spiritually (or all of the above), and we haven't been as eager to bind up those wounds as we were when we sent those who sustained them into the fray. When we see a veteran missing a limb, we discreetly avert our eyes because saying 'thank you' or asking 'How can I help you' would be too embarrassing (for us, not the wounded warrior).

I know, that's what we have the Department of Veterans Affairs for, right? Just continue to compartmentalize the carnage and how we help the survivors-it'll help you sleep and that's what's really important these days, being comfortably numb. 

I suspect all of the people who shot and edited this did so on their own time because the ones I've met are quality people who do what needs to be done without needing to be told. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and that you'll remember the men and women you'll see in it, not just on Armed Forces Day or Veterans Day, but every day. for all the days of their lives.

-bill kenny