When I was growing up, I found it unfair that my sister and I would get Veterans Day off from school, while our father -- an actual veteran of the United States Air Force -- had to go to work. We would usually spend part of our lazy day off making him cards or baking him a cake, but the gesture seemed a bit empty.
I had very little concept of just what he had done during those two years on Okinawa, since my only concept of the military came from “M*A*S*H.” My childhood took place in a decade of nuclear fears but no immediate risk of war.
Years later, after moving to Washington, my wife and I went down to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with her mother and stepfather, children of the generation shaped by that war. Though the Wall spoke to me in an abstract way, the impact on them was much greater. More than 58,000 of their peers had died in that long conflict. My youth, by contrast, had witnessed only the short conflicts in Grenada, Libya, and Panama, and the celebratory rout of what we now must call the First Iraq War.
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1 comment:
I went to school in the Washington, DC metro area, and it was the exact opposite there.
My father worked for the Federal Gov't and got off from work. That enabled him to visit the schools, and observe the activity in the classroom while we kids held our normal routines.
The school systems coordinated their "visit your schools" day to coincide with the 11th in order for this to happen.
I always liked it when my dad snuck into the classroom, and quietly hung around in the back of the room watching us.
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