Remembrance Day/Veterans Day

Valka D'Ur

Valka D'Ur

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Or whatever else your country calls/observes on November 11.

What did you do, if anything, to mark this day?

We don't think of it as a celebration in Canada. It's something we observe. We perform the Act of Remembrance and renew our promise to never forget those who gave their lives so we could live in peace.

The ceremony on Parliament Hill was especially poignant this year, due to the recent murder of a young soldier who was shot while guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National War Memorial. The ceremony included a musical tribute to him while the wreath-laying was going on. As well, the National War Memorial was rededicated, to include those who served and died in the Boer War, as well as the peacekeepers who were killed, and those in Afghanistan. Princess Anne was there.

The ceremony was multi-faith (with a small acknowledgment that some choose not to pray), and multi-lingual, with portions in English, French, and one of the aboriginal languages (not sure which one).
 
Not much of anything. It's always been a minor holiday to me, most years I forget it's even a thing. About the only thing I do is try to steer clear of flag worshipers.

Same with Memorial Day actually, we get two of basically the same holiday here lol
 
As every year, I played with our village wind band durig the remembrance ceremony at the monument for our village's casualties of both WWI and WWII.

The ceremony is organised by a local remembrance committee, and they always involve the children from 4th grade of primary school (10 year olds), and a couple of speeches are held. There still are a couple of WWII veterans (I think either forced labourers or former members of the resistance) that attend the ceremony, but they are all in their nineties now...

A trumpet player from our band plays the Last Post, and the whole band plays the Belgian and Flemish hymns.

here's a picture from my Instagram account: link
and from a local news site: link

And when all that is over, we start our annual bar hopping tour (another great tradition :-) )
 
I deplore the waste of human life.

And I hope against hope that people will one day realize that the use of violence to resolve conflict is a really bad idea.
 
Served on the border between west and east Germany as a border guard in the 2d ACR. Always regretted the fact that Poland was hung out to dry on the wrong side. I put that disgrace right up there with giving the Sudetenland to the damn Nazis. Churchill was strong but Roosevelt at that point was weak and Stalin of course was the devil they made a deal with.

Oh the sad weakness of democracy, the people so full of their own selves and their inflated sense of value and missing the needed sacrifice for the freedoms they take for granted.

The betrayal is what makes Poland the heart of NATO now.
 
I observe Armistice or Remembrance Day. Aside from observing the moment of silence at 11, I spent the day (off work) reading Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front, a history of soldiers' experiences as taken from their letters and diaries.
 
I made a point to personally thank the veterans I know and work with and shake their hands. A more humble group you are hard-pressed to meet.
 
To be honest, nothing. I couldn't think of anything that didn't feel like an empty gesture. Wearing a poppy is one thing, actually donating to organizations that help veterans is another.
 
I used to go down to the Civil War battlefield parks near where I lived, but there aren't many of those up in Boston.
 
I worked retail and thanked a veteran who went through my line. I also listened to Cigar Dave's Veterans Day podcast.
 
Largely by coincidence, spent the day with my veteran friend.

I wrote this two years ago

Veterans Day.

When I was in Tennessee for my cousin's wedding (who is the daughter of my decorated army veteran uncle who served in war from Vietnam through Afghanistan) I found my way into a bar in this small city called Clarksville.

Clarksville is the kind of city where bam, massive tornado hits and they rebuild like you never knew there was a storm. It's a a town with a very large military community, and a couple of other cool things like my extended family, a big ass university, and bars that stay open past 2AM. Anyway, back to the story, and the bar.

Inside was a woman who caught my eye, drinking by herself off to the side.

Within the shortest of conversations of getting to know one another, I learned that her husband recently returned from war. He was not far away, like outside or down the street--I can't remember. As I was about to bid her adieu, she lightly gripped our conversation by adding an important detail to her life's story.

"...He has PTSD" she looked me dead in the eye. It will be hard to forget the look on her face and the sound of her voice as she told me.... Looking at me but staring into space. Resigned. Forlorn. Ready to be there for this man, but still taking it all in. Resolved. Tired. A bit of a sigh. A bit of a cry.

It was the only thing she had wanted to say the whole conversation. "He has PTSD". The rest was just friendly small talk with a stranger. She needed to tell someone new. All she wanted was some validation that his wounds are her wounds, too. I couldn't really say anything other than that she was brave. I made the kind of confident claim that comes with drinking that treatment will continue to get dramatically better, "just hang in there." She offered a pained smile, nodded, shook her head, and said "yeah, I know" and then her eyes drifted away toward an invisible horizon.

This woman, maybe 28 at the oldest, was drinking alone on the Kentucky border at 3am on a Sunday morning, ready to tell the first stranger brave enough to approach her.
Her husband had returned with crushing PTSD, a wound so bad it made his own loved one a war casualty too.

Out on a Saturday night at 3am. For the 30 minutes I was in that bar, she was by herself, drinking, coming to terms with her new life ahead.

I can't say Happy Veteran's Day.

I can only say Veteran's Day and hope for their happiness. And the so many like them.

Veteran's Day.​
 
Antilogic said:
I used to go down to the Civil War battlefield parks near where I lived, but there aren't many of those up in Boston.
Click to expand...


Not much for Civil War battlefields. But Revolutionary War, it's there. And every town in the North which rated the name of village or more in the 1860s has a Civil War monument.

A friend and I went to see one of those small town Civil War monuments. And then spent part of the day touring a couple small towns and historic/scenic sights in the area.
 
Senethro said:
Always feel weird about this day because sometimes its as if all the war dead who died pointlessly or for the wrong cause get swept into the category of Noble Willing Heroes and glossed over.
Click to expand...
This being the centennial of the war for which it was created, I find myself much more aware than I think I've been in any year previous. I have family in the military so of course I honour veterans, but I've become guarded against the sort of blind pride that can so easily grease the wheels of pompous militarism. We remember the soldiers; we don't remember the wars.

Least of all the Great War. The Great War for Civilization, so I've been told it reads on the Victoria Crosses issued therein. The War to End All Wars. A war that began as nothing more than the usual great power squabble, ended with the destabilization of the world, and ground up tens of millions of lives in the process—for no other reason than because the countries could.

I used to think that Sassoon was just a bit too bitter in "On Passing the New Menin Gate", but now I can at least understand his frustration. We want to honour our veterans, but we're so desperate to make their sacrifice meaningful that we end up inadvertently moralizing and glorifying the very horror that destroys them: they don't die for great power pride or diplomatic incompetence; they die for peace, for democracy, for respective national virtue.

Justification is easy when you win. But what, then, did the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets die for?

I know, from personal contact, that there are soldiers that serve precisely because they hold virtuous convictions, because they want to uphold the humanistic values of their home country. But that is not why states go to war, and even in the era of R2P we're hard-pressed to find a scenario where that is a principal aim. We want to honour our veterans, but we still shirk from asking why they have to fight in the first place.



"War's a joke for me and you,
While we know such things are true." —Sassoon

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death,–
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,–
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,–
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed,– knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

—Wilfred Owen, "The Next War", 1917–18
 
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That's an excellent post, and I'm struggling to put into words my reaction to it. I think what Remembrance Day should be about is remembering that people who go and fight on our behalf (and against us) are fundamentally people like the rest of us. It's all too easy to feel that it was all so unimaginably different and all so long ago, and by extension that wars and fighting are things that happen to other people or characters in stories. It's even easier to assume that the people on the other side are some amorphous whole or an inhuman species of pest to be wiped out - especially when you're shooting at each other. For most people, the names read out from war memorials don't have faces attached to them: though part of the point is that for some of us they do, it also, I think, reminds everyone else that a million dead are not just a statistic.
 
SS-18 ICBM said:
Wouldn't that be November 11, 2018?
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World War I was 1914 - 1918.

It used to be that the bands would play some WWI songs during the veterans' march after the wreath-laying ceremony, but they haven't done that since Canada's last WWI veteran died. This year, however, the nearby church bells played "Tipperary." I wonder how many people recognized it.
 
Yes but the armistice was declared on Nov 11 1911.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year. No. Wait. That's not right.
 
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