Sunday, November 11, 2007

Veterans Day



skippy said it better than I can.

Monkeyfister said it better than I can.

Poets who said it better than I can:
The Last of the Light Brigade
In Flanders Field
Dulce Et Decorum Est
War Is Kind And Other Lines
Song writers who said it better than I can:
Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire

The Grave by Don McLean

Masters of War by Bob Dylan
My humble offering:
When we send our men and women to die for us, people who volunteered to die in a just cause, we are honor bound to tell them the truth and make sure the cause is truly just.

We are honor bound to equip them as best we can afford.

We are honor bound to take care of their families while they serve, and especially while they are deployed.

We are honor bound to take care of them when they come home.

No matter how they come home, whether it is only as memories, remains, wounded or relatively whole.

We are honor bound to our veterans, and if we sever those bonds we've sacrificed our children and our honor.



Nothing has changed since last year's Veterans Day except the record number of deaths since then in both Iraq and Afghanistan.


SteveAudio: Great post, Sailor. Let me add my favorite war poem (God, what a contradiction!):
    Dolls' faces are rosier but these were children
    their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle
    dark lenses in whose quicksilvery glances
    the sunlight quivered. These blenched lips
    were warm once and bright with blood
    but blood
    held in a moist bleb of flesh
    not spilt and spatter'd in touseled hair.

    In these shadowy tresses
    red petals did not always
    thus clot and blacken to a scar.

    These are dead faces:
    wasps' nests are not more wanly waxen
    wood embers not so grely ashen.

    They are laid out in ranks
    like paper lanterns that have fallen
    after a night of riot
    extinct in the dry morning air.

Herbert Read

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