QotD: Veterans Day

It's Veterans Day! How are you going to honor the veterans today?

I really don't think anything I could do personally would be relevant given how shabbily so many of our vets are being treated by the government.  One thing I'd like to do to honor them is get inside the VA and start sending out the disability checks to those who deserve them and offer appropriate psychiatric treatment and counseling services to those that need them. 

If I lived closer, I would go to the grave of Staff Sergeant Ralph W. Robertson, USMC, whose 10 years in the Corps included two tours of duty in Vietnam.  During one of those tours, both of his parents died in a tornado in his small hometown in Arkansas.  The Corps shipped him home, gave him a week to attend the funerals and grieve, and then shipped him back to the war.  Another time, he was separated from his unit and lost in the jungles of Southeast Asia for a week or possibly more.  I don't know a lot of details because he didn't talk about it, beyond the fact that it was terror beyond words.  I spent my entire life believing that somehow I could make him better after all that, that I could offer him a child's rather stupid love as a replacement for the support he did not get from the VA, the government, or much of American society at the time.  I didn't know that there were things so horrible that maybe they couldn't ever be fixed.  I used to call him every Veterans' Day and honor our vets by loving the one of them as much as I possibly could.  I was always so sorry that it was never enough.  Sometimes I tell people that my dad was the first man to ever break my heart, and people always misunderstand.  He didn't mean to break it, and he certainly didn't abuse me or anything like that.  But watching a good man, a strong man, a man you love with all your wee heart break down as a person and finding yourself totally inadequate to help him--that will crush your heart almost beyond repair.

I'm sure if I lived in Arkansas, I would have taken my son to the grave of his grandfather he never met.  Someday, when my son's older, I'll tell him about the triangle-folded flag hanging on the wall and the picture of the man in uniform hanging next to it. 

In the end, there's hardly anything we can do to honor combat veterans that is sufficient, is there?  Giving them the medical care, disability payments, and psychiatric care they need is a good step, but in the future, I'd like to honor our vets by not sending them into poorly planned, unnecessary, and inhumane wars.  We could try not asking them to do their jobs futilely and blindly.  We could honor the sacrifices they are willing to make for us by being more honorable about when we ask them to make those sacrifices and to what ends.