Remembering Sacrifice

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 

The Classical features Matt Ufford’s series of vignettes spanning his service in Iraq. Read it. I’ve written about Veteran’s Day before, and how we regard those who serve. My relationship to the military is complicated; I have family and close friends who served or are serving, but war and combat are the worst activity we continually return to. Live and don’t learn. I wonder if our national regard for veterans and the activity of service, and our fetishistic hero-worship of the returned, make more war inevitable.

Armistice Day recognized sacrifice without celebrating. That seems more true to the spirit of combat veterans; as a country we ask them to do the unthinkable. We ask because it is necessary. They do it because someone must. Celebrating cold necessity seems wrong.

Picture and quote via.

Tagged as: Armistice Day, Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Matt Ufford, The Classical, Veterans Day