Veterans Day memories Nov. 11, 2025
We got just a bit of snow today, a flurry that dusted the roof of the shed in our back yard, and left bits of white on the still-green remnants of grass.
Snow is a four letter word, and yet, I’m still nostalgic
about it, as we stagger into the Christmas season and I still have fond memories
of a time when the holidays meant something, people still in my life that made
it special.
This is also Veterans Day with all the associated events I’m
still scrambling to cover, with the head of the local VFW still asking me for a
picture of me when I was in service, which I am reluctant to give him since I
spent so little time there. I’m still shocked at the promotion I got when I
left, and the medal they awarded me because my service came during a time of
war.
I’m not like my ancestors – Robert and William – who fought in
wars at the start of the last century, one in the Army, one in the Navy, both
meeting up oddly enough on a battle field in Mexico at one point, an unexpected
reunion even local media celebrated. Robert was my grandmother’s favorite
relative, a real bad boy, who once turned the guns on his ship on a town in
Mexico that had taken some of his shipmates prisoner, and threatened to level
the town if they were not released, possibly escalating the war even further.
The Mexican’s complied.
William on the other hand went on to fight in the First World
War where he became a hero written up in history books and received honors from
General Pershing and was later transported back to France where he was awarded
one of its highest honors.
As a civilian, Robert lived in a shack where he did mechanic
work, and family members used to bring him bottles of booze, fading away like
all good soldier and sailors do, while William came home to marry his other
brother’s widow, something the family still talks about all these years later,
and settled down into a respectable life. Since I was my grandfather’s first grandchild,
he took me around to meet all of these people, although I was still an infant
and too young to recall them, although they all remembered me, including some
of the more distant family members whose names I knew, but didn’t recall – one of
whom, my great grandmother’s sister – I met a few years before her death, and
who I had once interviewed for my newspaper without realizing we were related.
She knew me and my name and my lineage.
Nearly all of my closer family members served in the
military, Army, Navy, even marines. Harold and Frank served in the National
Guard together (Frank constantly complaining years later on how Harold managed
to get Frank to do all his duty assignment. Albie, a pacifist, served as a
medic in the Korean War, and got stuck in a cave caring for wounded soldiers
after the Chinese swept over the fragile allied lines. He refused to talk about
the war, and for a time, suffered post traumatic stress. Ted, the youngest of
my uncles, served in Vietnam, and was evacuated just prior to his unit being
overrun.
My father was a sailor during the end of World War II and was
in the fleet during the Japanese surrender, and later was on the ship that went
to the North Pole, and still later, forced to sail through an Atomic cloud
during a test of a nuclear bomb in the Pacific.
He was a cad, who fled me and my mother, just after my
birth, but he was also a hero, having earned a Silver Star.
I have only one memory of him as an infant, but later discovered
our paths crossed when I was a young adult.
I guess there is something special in all these people, who
went onto do something extraordinary, when I did not. But I think of them and
my role on days like this.
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