Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day. From the end of World War One, the only war with enough conceit to bill itself as The Great War. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We were at war. Tick, tick, tick, we were at peace. The first of the autumnal holidays, celebrated from sea to shining sea with savings on washing machines and wide screen HDTVs. But not at my house.

At my house, the two military holidays, Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, have always been a little more reverential than knocking fifty bucks off the price of a stereo. My mother and father were both Marines. My dad went to war for this country three times. At various times, he was responsible for recruiting, for training and for supplying the Marine Corps. I think about that often. If I screw up a Web page, and don't properly close a <table>, nothing really serious happens. Most browsers today will (correctly) assume that it should have closed after the last was closed. It isn't a big deal. I don't hear from my boss either way. I don't get spanked for not closing the table and I don't get a parade when I do. But my dad went to work every day at the kind of job, like being an airline pilot or a doctor, where everything matters.

If you pick some kid off of the street and fill him full of ideas and sign him up for a job where he loses a foot and can't sleep nights, you are in some way responsible.

If it is your job to teach this kid, in only twelve weeks, how not to lose a foot, and he does it anyway, then you in some way are responsible.

It may come about because you were distracted, tired, or because you were more interested in becoming his friend than in training him. And if your unit needs bullets, batteries or bandages and none are available, you have let them down, too, possibly with disastrous results. You cannot turn this kind of thinking off at the end of the day, can you? Or just walk away from it after twenty years? Maybe that is why Marines may stop getting paid, but they never, ever, stop being Marines.

Thanks to my dad's service, I can now save thirty, forty and even fifty percent on home furnishings this week. Not a bad deal, huh? At least I got my dad back. A whole lot of Marine families were not so lucky.

There are more than fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and fifty names on The Wall, the VietNam Veteran's Memorial, in Washington, DC. That's just for one war. The oldest was sixty-three (and you thought mowing the lawn was hard work at your age—try going to war in your sixties). The youngest was only fifteen. When I was fifteen, "courage" meant trying to touch a boob. A Marine named Bullock was only fifteen when he lost his life in service to his country. There are similar stories representing similar sacrifice in every war and in every military engagement that this country has ever been involved in.

Dads and brothers and friends and sweet hearts don't come home. Ball games go unvisited, lakes and streams go unfished. Kids learn to ride bikes and how to shave from other people. Someone else meets them as they graduate or get married and says "I am proud of you." Old cars go unrestored. Back porches go unpainted. Gardens go unplanted. But those kinds of things go unreported in the news, which focuses on simple, innocent, generic numbers. Three were killed, yesterday. Two, today.

It's okay to enjoy the last of the nice weather. It's okay to take the family out to dinner, this weekend. It's even okay to save money on a new iPod, this week. Just pause for a moment and remember the men and women who bought and paid for this day off with their service, and their lives. And remember all of those empty chairs, at dining rooms and recital halls and schools and churches. The men and women who should be sitting there aren't buying tires this week at any price. The least we can do is to remember them, once a year.