Don’t Forget Why Tuesday is a Holiday
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The history of this country is composed not in the notations of war—dates, places, outcomes—but in the private reckonings of the men and women who marched off to fight them. Our first century unspooled with such grim frequency that the nation’s soil, both fields and rivers, could recall the taste of American blood—shed upon itself, brother against brother, or spilled anonymously in the distant churn of Atlantic crises.
As the nation grew, so too did the radius of its military reach. The twentieth century opened with four million Americans crossing the Atlantic, summoned to the trenches and uncertainty of World War I. Barely a generation later, more than sixteen million responded to a greater call, the second catastrophic convulsion of Europe, embroiling American lives in the earnest attempt to vanquish Hitler and the nightmares he conjured.
Yet history is rarely content to rest. The fears of a world divided by ideology sent nearly seven million Americans to the Korean peninsula; almost three million more to the swelter and uncertainty of Vietnam. In these conflicts, the distance from home was measured in more than just miles—it was measured, too, in the shifting definitions of victory, duty, and loss.
Even now, American service members find themselves on shifting sands and unfamiliar streets in the Middle East, negotiating the perpetually unfinished business of democracy, the unending labor against extremism. The pattern is familiar—departures at odd hours, letters written in haste, reunions that sometimes never come. Boots on the ground become the recent shorthand for policy, while lives at stake remain the reality.
Across all these decades, justice and outcome have been disputed. Wars won, wars lost, others consigned to the gray spaces history prefers not to revisit. But today is not for adjudication, nor for the moral arithmetic that makes history possible to teach but impossible to inhabit.
Today, all reckoning yields to gratitude—a simple acknowledgment of those who heeded the nation’s imperfect call. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard—men and women for whom the cost of citizenship included years given, ambitions deferred, whole lifetimes altered.
There is, too, the intimacy every American family finds in such histories. My own traces that peculiar braid of patriotism and necessity back through generations. The Scottish ancestors who reimagined themselves as rebels in the Carolina upcountry, resisting British regulars and Loyalists alike. The Confederate forebear, presumed lost through four years of civil war, who returned on a borrowed horse so changed by time that kin barely recognized him.
Great-uncles endured the trenches of the Great War; an uncle survived three German captures in World War II, slipping away each time from the improbable net. My own father, missing Korea by a sliver of circumstance, served for over a decade, kept stateside at last by hearing loss—a memento from infantry days that, perhaps, offered as much salvation as sacrifice.
I glance back to my own generation. I missed the draft; many friends did not. And now, the cycles of conflict migrate inexorably to our children—a friend’s son in harm’s way, another name mourned but never forgotten.
On Tuesday, then, the chorus of thanks must be sung not only for those who wore the uniform overseas, but also for the hands and hearts who sustained the home front—the linchpins, often overlooked, of any war effort. For those of us who watched rather than waged, the only fitting salute is silence, reflection, and deep respect.
This Veterans Day, let gratitude be neither pro forma nor perfunctory. Let us see, and thank, those who took up the burdens we did not—and whose sacrifices, said and unsaid, make the remainder of our history possible.
The rest is memory, obligation, and the unresolved silence that remains long after the last parade disperses.
