Battling Memory

The following is my contribution to the collection of Veteran's Day posts honoring those who have served this country well.

They call it Remembrance Day in Britain, wearing red poppies pinned to their lapels. In 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month, the guns along the Western front fell silent and brought to a close the most destructive war humanity had yet wrought. Entire generations disappeared in the grass below Ypres, Verdun, and along the Marne.

On this day in America, we do not only remember those who have perished, but those who remain. We honor and thank those men and woman who voluntarily laid aside the comforts and idleness afforded us by those who went before, those who chose to descend into the greatest hells of human imagining so that we might be free.

We thank those who lost life and limb in the cause of freedom. We thank those who came home unharmed in body, but marked in mind. We remember our soldiers even as they remember their brothers and sisters in arms, even as they cast their minds back into that darkness and contemplate the personal price they've paid, the gift they've given to the rest of us.

Growing up, Veteran's Day has always been a quiet affair in my family. While others thank past and present troops for their service, my family and I quietly contemplate our own costs, watch my father with unsteady eyes, say little to nothing, token or not.

After several tours in Vietnam, he returned home irrevocably changed, so my mother has said. Darker, moodier, angry, depressed, sullen. His limbs were intact, but his mind had been shattered by some nameless horror. Growing up, I had only heard whispers of these things at family parties, after most of the guests had left and only a few drunken, melancholy relatives remained.

Even then, his health began to fail over the years. Diabetes, a heart attack, thyroid medications, and other afflictions I dimly remember from my childhood. I only recall spending great amounts of time in doctors' offices as one illness after another appeared from a clear blue sky. Only when I was a little older did doctors mention something called Agent Orange, and a host of other chemicals used in war.

Today, my father is still with us but slower, a rusted engine of a man worn down through endless disrepair. How happy his parents were when he returned home, apparently unharmed. Only through the decades have the true costs of his time at war become known, become real.

We suffer through the mood swings, the health crises. Just the other day I found myself in a veteran's services office, a stack of papers in my hand. The government promised to make financial amends for the biological results of their chemical warfare in Vietnam. I handed over the bulging manila envelope to the disinterested clerk behind the counter. Medical records and lists of prescriptions my father is taking. She asked me over and over whether or not we had filled out the questionnaires correctly. If there was even the slightest error, the bureaucracy would simply throw the form away.

Money is a small consolation to my father and his family. He and millions like him carry the wars with them always, fighting battles long after they've returned to American shores.

It is for these reasons and many others that the depths of their service to this nation is simply unfathomable, almost unthankable, because it seems so paltry in the face of such great difficulty.

But, we thank them nonetheless, for the gift of this country and our freedom.

Comments

[PatC]

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