Veterans Day

I used to make military documentaries for a living.  I interviewed a bunch of veterans of different wars.  Once, on a kind of oral history project, we set up a makeshift studio in a conference room at the annual VFW convention.  For the run of the convention, we interviewed combat veterans for 14 hours a day.  Most had served in World War II, but we had some Korea and Vietnam vets, too.

As transforming as the experience was for me, it was, I think, equally transforming for them.  Liberated by the camera to say things they'd never said before, we heard story after story of unbelievable horror and heroism.  Old men, the patriarchs of their families, strong men who had remained stoic in times of family trouble, broke down and wept telling stories of friends dead fifty years.  They were ready to unburden themselves, and we were their vehicle. 

When the interviews were over, the wives who had been sitting in silence in the shadows would come up to me and say, "I've never heard that before.  I've never really known what he went through."  For fifty years, the men held it in: The pain, the anger, the fear.  All the emotions thought unmanly by that generation, exposed and raw and unhealed after decades.

After all the research I've done, all the interviews I've conducted, all the verbal and videographic  re-creations I've made of war and combat and loneliness far from home, I have no idea what it is that makes these men -- and, today, some women, too -- capable of enduring what they endured.  I hope, but doubt, that under similar circumstances I'd have done the same.

The world we enjoy today is the product of the sacrifices American veterans made in Normandy, Chosin, Hoa Lo, Yorktown, Iwo Jima and thousands of other places, remembered and forgotten.  The world we look forward to in the future is their product as well, with contributions being made at this very moment by the wearers of boots-on-the-ground today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen don't decide where and when to fight; they simply go when their country calls.  We owe them for that.

Comments

[Squidley]

I recently started a job where I work closely with people in the military. I have a new-found respect for the military in general, and all the people in my family who have served, which includes my father, all my uncles, my grandfather, one of my brothers, and his wife. While I don't regret the choices I've made, I do sometimes wish I had served too. Well, now is my chance to serve my country, in a supporting role, and I'm proud to be able to share my skills (much more developed now than when I was 18!) with the incredible men and women armed forces.