Veteran's Day
I was walking Baz home from school after his Veteran's Day assembly, and he asked if he knew any veterans. I said that all of his grandfathers had served, and they were all veterans. Three out of four of my dad's generation are eligible for burial in military cemetaries (although Jim is riding on his wife's ticket). All of my grandfathers served, too, and the grandmother my daughter is named after was a ship-builder.
For my family, military service was both patriotic and practical. Because he served, my father got GI Bill money and went to college. He took his college education and went back to Africa, and served there again, as a healer. From what I know and can deduce about his (brief) military career, he volunteered before he got drafted, but after he lost his deferrment (because of French, which became ironic later). He was injured in boot camp, his entire leg shredded, tendon-wise. If you've ever had arthroscopic knee surgery, you can thank my dad for being a guinea pig for parts of it. He has a scar that runs from shin to mid-thigh, and no kneecap. When he and mom met, he was still on crutches, and I remember other times in my life when he reinjured it and had to go back to them. A few Christmases ago, he got a clot in the bad leg. Now he's on permanent blood thinners. Anyway, he spent a long time in the hospital, and then he was semi-ambulatory but in no way fit for service, so he persuaded them to let him serve his foreign tour at a hospital abroad. He ended up in Etheopia. As a rememberence of this time, my parents own a naughty painting about King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba, and a lovely set of etched stemware. And a gift of service. Hospitals are very boring, so dad (somehow, you'd think jeeps had clutches) got a job driving around and checking on rural health clinics, delivering vaccines. He found his calling. When he came back to the States and was discharged, he went to college. He met my mother, and they got married just before he went to grad school in healthcare administration. He walked down the aisle without crutches, and it was a big deal.
Tonight, I plan to have the kids call and thank their grandfathers. I think about how so few of my peers serve, and then I consider that our very ability to opt out is due to our fathers (and mothers) sacrifices, and the GI Bill. Children of the college-educated are far less likely to enter service. I wonder if there will ever again be a war so just and outrageous to stir us to volunteer like that again. I hope that Obama is right, that we can learn new and different ways of serving each other, and offer many paths to up-and-comers.
Also, I was trying to decide which of the Lost Generation's poems to use when I found the Rupert Brooke poem below. I was looking at Brooke because he wrote The Soldier, which was prophetic, and does sort of spring to mind. But he also wrote a not-a-love-poem called The One Before The Last. It's about heartbreak, and being just old enough to realize that no matter how bad it is, it will fade in time. He talks about being in love in 1905, when he was 18, and I think, extrapolating the time, that it is reasonable to think he is writing, in 1915,
Oh! bitter thoughts I had in plenty.
But here’s the worst of it-
I shall forget, in Nineteen-twenty,
You ever hurt abit!
Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915
(of a septic mosquito bite, but he was on his way to Gallipoli, so we can't say his odds were good either way)
(Dude got around, evidently. Go you, Rupert.)
For my family, military service was both patriotic and practical. Because he served, my father got GI Bill money and went to college. He took his college education and went back to Africa, and served there again, as a healer. From what I know and can deduce about his (brief) military career, he volunteered before he got drafted, but after he lost his deferrment (because of French, which became ironic later). He was injured in boot camp, his entire leg shredded, tendon-wise. If you've ever had arthroscopic knee surgery, you can thank my dad for being a guinea pig for parts of it. He has a scar that runs from shin to mid-thigh, and no kneecap. When he and mom met, he was still on crutches, and I remember other times in my life when he reinjured it and had to go back to them. A few Christmases ago, he got a clot in the bad leg. Now he's on permanent blood thinners. Anyway, he spent a long time in the hospital, and then he was semi-ambulatory but in no way fit for service, so he persuaded them to let him serve his foreign tour at a hospital abroad. He ended up in Etheopia. As a rememberence of this time, my parents own a naughty painting about King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba, and a lovely set of etched stemware. And a gift of service. Hospitals are very boring, so dad (somehow, you'd think jeeps had clutches) got a job driving around and checking on rural health clinics, delivering vaccines. He found his calling. When he came back to the States and was discharged, he went to college. He met my mother, and they got married just before he went to grad school in healthcare administration. He walked down the aisle without crutches, and it was a big deal.
Tonight, I plan to have the kids call and thank their grandfathers. I think about how so few of my peers serve, and then I consider that our very ability to opt out is due to our fathers (and mothers) sacrifices, and the GI Bill. Children of the college-educated are far less likely to enter service. I wonder if there will ever again be a war so just and outrageous to stir us to volunteer like that again. I hope that Obama is right, that we can learn new and different ways of serving each other, and offer many paths to up-and-comers.
Also, I was trying to decide which of the Lost Generation's poems to use when I found the Rupert Brooke poem below. I was looking at Brooke because he wrote The Soldier, which was prophetic, and does sort of spring to mind. But he also wrote a not-a-love-poem called The One Before The Last. It's about heartbreak, and being just old enough to realize that no matter how bad it is, it will fade in time. He talks about being in love in 1905, when he was 18, and I think, extrapolating the time, that it is reasonable to think he is writing, in 1915,
Oh! bitter thoughts I had in plenty.
But here’s the worst of it-
I shall forget, in Nineteen-twenty,
You ever hurt abit!
Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915
(of a septic mosquito bite, but he was on his way to Gallipoli, so we can't say his odds were good either way)
(Dude got around, evidently. Go you, Rupert.)