The reverent tribute of Veterans Day
Is today sacred? It can be, and not because of any mysticism in the coincidental collection of ones that make up its signature.
The late author Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war in World War II, was no special fan of Veterans Day. In the famous opening to his novel “Breakfast of Champions,” he eloquently expressed his favor for “a sacred day called Armistice Day.”
He recalled the origins of the observance and the reverence that induced people around the world to — as Daily Herald assistant city editor Chuck Keeshan writes elsewhere in today’s edition — fall silent during the 11th minute of the 11th hour of Nov. 11, supposedly the minute in 1918 when, in Vonnegut’s phrase, “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”
Vonnegut claims to have talked to WWI veterans who remembered that minute and heard “the voice of God” in its silence.
“So we still have among us,” he wrote, “some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.”
We do not have those men among us any longer. The last veteran of World War I, West Virginian Frank Buckles, died last February at the age of 110. And the naive optimism following the “War to End All Wars” has been tucked tidily away in the vaults of history since at least the bombing of Guernica.
But we have among us, even here in the suburbs, thousands who have endured in the name of freedom the harsh brutality of war and through it may know a little more than most about what God has to say to mankind.
“I could sell tickets for my nightmares,” retired Army Capt. Kenneth Jacobs, co-founder of the Wheaton Purple Hearts chapter, told our Susan Dibble. Jacobs was injured in Iraq in 2003.
Thomas “Tex” Tracy, of Winfield, recalled for Dibble the sting of returning, injured, from Vietnam to taunts and demonstrations. Tracy still carries in his back shrapnel from an explosion at the base of Black Virgin Mountain in 1969.
And Linda Stack, of Arlington Heights, expresses in our front-page story today a raw truth that many of us may acknowledge but only veterans and those who love them can fully understand. Stack lost her 20-year-old only son James a year ago in Afghanistan.
“I didn’t know the cost of our freedom,” she told staff writer Deborah Donovan. “I didn’t really appreciate my freedom.”
Few of us can really know the full price of that appreciation, and with America’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan supposedly winding down, we may be even less inclined to ponder it. But that is what we are called upon to do today. The idealism of Armistice Day may have given way to the grateful reverence of Veterans Day, but it is still a sacred tribute to which we are called.
And, like Vonnegut, we ought not throw away any sacred things.