Veterans Day—A Paradigm of How Much We Value Life

My stepdaughter and her husband gave me a book for father’s day, James Bradley’s Flags of our Fathers. It should be read by every young person thinking of joining the military.

The book chronicles the lives, from birth till death, of the six marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. This flag raising, as you may know, was photographed by Joe Rosenthal, an AP photographer; the photograph earned him a Pulitzer Prize and later became the model for the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, VA. The book is a story of how ordinary, undistinguished men acted with “uncommon valor” and how they were treated afterward. It is not a pleasant story; it vividly displays the illogical American attitudes toward the men who serve that all veterans have long been aware of.

When we send young men and women off to war, we call them heroic and patriotic. Support our Troops becomes the ubiquitous slogan of the day and anyone who thinks the war is wrong is considered unpatriotic. Some of these young men and women never return, some return maimed, and all return scarred. And then they are virtually abandoned to fend for themselves. How can one explain these perverse attitudes?

I have mulled this question over in my mind for many years, never finding a satisfactory answer. But while reading this book, I had what might be called an epiphany. The answer became as clear as glass, and my opinion is that Veterans Day epitomizes it perfectly.

Veterans Day is a national holiday, one of the four holidays set by date—November 11^th—and was originally called Armistice Day and was established to commemorate the end of World War I. Being a holiday set by date, it usually falls on a workday. Government employees and the employees of a few industries get the day off. To veterans who work elsewhere, it is just another workday. The holiday called Veterans Day is not a holiday for most veterans, but it is a day we supposedly honor them. Some honor indeed! This nation either can’t afford or is unwilling to even give its veterans one day a year off. That’s how we support our troops when the war is over.

I have often heard it said that what distinguishes democracy from totalitarianism is that democratic nations exist for the sake of their peoples while in a totalitarian state, people exist for the sake of the nation. Japan, until the end of the Second World War, is a paradigm example. To the Japanese, being willing to die for the sake of the country was considered a great honor, while preserving one’s life by surrender was a abject disgrace. The Muslims whom we today refer to as terrorists are another example; dying for Islam makes one a martyr. But let’s think about this distinction.

When a nation, democratic or totalitarian, sends people off to war, it must consider those people to be expendable. The Russians during World War II are said to have sent troops into battle in ways that resulted in horrendous casualties. An apt analogy is this: suppose you lend someone something, and the person who borrows it either fails to return it saying it was lost or returns it damaged. If the item was not of much consequence, you might say, “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve got more just like it.” The item was expendable. That’s what people are when they are sent off to war, and it is of absolutely no consequence if some of these expendable people return or return maimed; they are still expendable. To concern ourselves with the welfare of expendable people can be likened to concerning ourselves with the welfare of, say, an expendable shirt. And that is my epiphany. We can abandon veterans because they are just as expendable when they return as they were when we sent them off to war.

So although we like to say that we value human life in ways that other nations don’t, we are fooling ourselves.