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An Anniversary to Remember

By PPC Carmine A. Somma

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in the year 1918, the first of this century's two World Wars ended. During the tenuous peace that followed it was customary for the entire nation to pause at 11 a.m. each Nov. 11 for a moment of silence to remember the war-dead and to honor them. But as soon as Europe and America had raised up a new generation to marching age, war broke out again.

By the time that even more bloody conflict, World War II, came to an end more than 53 years ago, and the day was expanded to encompass yet another war. Armistice Day became Veterans Day. It is not a time of celebration. In Canada, it is called Remembrance Day which captures its true significance. In the heyday of radio which occurred in the time between the wars, the networks abandoned their regular programming at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11 to broadcast a bugler playing taps from Arlington National Cemetery and in the neighborhoods of New York City, when the commemoration fell on a warm day and windows were open, the sound was everywhere. The heavy but appropriate silence that followed lingers in the memory of those who experienced it. The bugle no longer is customary, nor are there many left who remember the dead of that first terrible war. They lie mute beneath the headstones in national cemeteries. They lie with the still-remembered dead of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and of all the intervention forays and small wars that fill the history of this deadly century.

For the most part, the holiday has drifted into empty and vapid commercialism marked by rote ceremonies and early holiday season sales. Writing on this occasion, year after year, Veterans Day becomes a bit less patriotic and a bit more mercantile. This year, however, is different. This, the 53rd anniversary of the end of World War II. This is one of those years when it is natural to pause to look back as if it happened yesterday. For the men and women who experienced that war directly, this is not an easy experience. The collective unconscious of the 20th century is a place of shadows, of memories that should be nightmares, and nightmares that should not be memories. There are human beings living among us far removed from the concentration camps and the battlefields who have been too close to human depravity and to the ingenuity of weapons design.

There are legions of men who never came home or who came home in body bags. They never knew the GI Bill which paid for college educations and homes for so many veterans, or the 52/20 club that entitled veterans to collect $20 a week for a year after their return. They just died, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes terrified, sometimes sound asleep. The wives they never gave children, and those missing children never gave them grandchildren. They are an emptiness in the national memory. The old men who aren't here and the old women who are here can remember them. This 53rd anniversary is one of those singular moments when his lost generation will live again in the minds of their comrades, their families, their sweethearts. And then life will go on until the rememberers are themselves forgotten. You look back and wonder where have all the years gone. It seems that time just flew by. Again, there are no regrets. As an ancient Greek poet once said, "We live not as we would like, but as we can."