Veteran's Day, the Feast of Saint Martin...Armistice Day (Redux)

 Today we commemorate the anniversary of the end of World War I…The Great War…the war to end all wars…so it was said…though regrettably it was not.

 I am a veteran, as is my father and some-few of my friends…just a few, and that includes a couple of my shipmates who I have maintained some connection with since my enlistment ended, thirty years ago.

 From the end of World War I, until 1954, we called this holiday Armistice Day, as a remembrance of that moment in that first great-global-conflict, when the fighting stopped along lines, in the trenches and across all-fronts.

 The end of the war choreographed like a dance, stopping suddenly, all at once.

 The end of the conflict came at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month; as if the war had a director who yelled “cut!” As if all the actors on the stage…all the pawns in the field, all the millions of people in their graves could get up from what they were doing and go home, that is not what happened; WWI was not a play.

 Nearly twenty million people were killed, twenty million families broken, with many millions more suffering in the aftermath from broken bodies and broken minds…and broken hearts.

 World War I was perceived by those who endured it as so horrible that it would end war itself, end it for all time…some folks believed…humans are prone to wishful thinking.

 

the gods of war are busy, always

sewing conflicts that are self-seeding,

perennial cycles of violence

hungers that cannot be satisfied

a thirst that cannot be quenched

the gods of war are always busy

Eris and Aries, discord and strife

constant as the wind

that turns mountains into dust

and yet reliant on our failings

 

 The eleventh of November is also the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, the patron saint of warriors, the first Christian soldier, St. Martin of the Sword…it was in recognition of him, and his feast that this date was selected to bring World War I to a close.

 The end might have come sooner for the soldiers in the struggle, but the politicians acting like art-directors, wanted to wait for a properly symbolic moment to bring the curtain down. They might have ended it the day before and some soldiers who perished might have lived to go home.

 At 11:11:11 the fighting stopped and the war ended, soldiers who had just moments before been locked in combat, became liberated and crossed the no-man’s land between their fortified tranches to share their rations with beer and songs...the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, it was easy to remember, set your clocks and synchronize your watch to.   

 Sulpicius Severus penned Saint Martin’s hagiography. It is by and large a work of fiction as most hagiographies were, either cut from whole cloth, or steeped and dyed from the barest scintilla of truth. Having said that, I will also say that…it is not likely that Martin of Tours ever lived, not the man we read about anyway. He is no more real than Peter Parker, Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne. Even if there was some such person, we are certain that the reports of the many miracles he performed, including raising the dead on more than one occasion, were all make-believe and lies.

Be mindful.

The Church has always had a penchant for relating falsehoods to the believers. 

Martin’s “life” is a fiction and our celebration of it does not represent the Christian Gospels very well. Severus’ mythologization of him is just another terrible series fables penned with terrible purpose, because through it the Church gave permission for Christians to takes up arms...it gave Christian soldiers leave to march to war, a vocation which had theretofore been forbidden to the faithful, and a matter of deep contention in the Church.

The spirits of conflict have a will of their own…and we are seemingly bond to theirs, like the double helix in our cells that determines so much our nature, one from which there is no deviation; it is like a disease with no cure.

 Let me tell the truth now…there is no god of war.

 War is product of human failure, it is governed by human machinations and caried out through human predation, by base pretenders to divine authority, we are beset by them in every generation.

 In 1954, President Eisenhower, who had been Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, he changed the name and thereby the nature of the November 11^th holiday, when he signed the law that turned Armistice Day into Veteran’s Day; a soldier himself, he did so to honor all Veterans whoever they might be, men and women, young and old who had served in any conflict, anywhere in the world.

 Friend or foe, ally or adversary, on this day we celebrate the courage of the average person, the women and men under arms, who were (and are) willing to risk everything for their tribe, their nation or their clan, weather they chose to be in the field, to set sail, to stand on a wall or leap from the sky, weather they chose to be soldiers or sailors, airmen or marines.

 That is what we celebrate today on Veteran’s Day; we do not celebrate the end of war, because it seems that war itself will never end. We do not celebrate the fictional life of a fictional saint, whose usefulness as a tool of propaganda promoted the idea that it was not only possible to serve Jesus with a sword, but laudable. Neither do we celebrate the false-claim that peace could ever be the fruit of war…the fruit of peace springs from a different seed altogether.

 If we are looking to harvest peace then it is incumbent on us to  sew tolerance and mercy, compassion and humility, justice and equity…and justice again.

 What we celebrate today is the character of those men and women who had the courage to enlist, to risk their lives for the sake of their sisters and brothers, whether at home or beside them in the field…we celebrate especially those who have or had been pressed into service against their will, and who served honorably nonetheless.

 We should always celebrate that quality of character, while simultaneously naming the flaws in our collective-character that lead again and again into conflict with one another, we must shun: fear and greed, anger and hatred, along with all of our calamitous attributes.

 The spirits of conflict have a will of their own…they own a piece of us, they reside in each of us….propel us toward whatever end…driving us toward something that presents itself as victory while dancing in a field of ruins.

 We are possessed…collectively; we are collectively…possessed.

 One hundred years after the end of World War I, we are still waging war all around the world. The United States of America is supplying arms to Ukraine funding the war in Europe, supplying weapons to the Israelis funding the ongoing war in the eastern Mediterranean, supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia, who is fighting a war by proxy with Iran in Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula; we are funding and feeding conflicts in every sector of the globe.

 At the core of these conflicts is a denial of these axiomatic principles of a just society:

 The legitimate powers of government may only derived only by the consent of the governed, and that all-people are endowed with inalienable rights, the chief among them being: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

 Such truths do not matter to men who view human beings as assets…or liabilities, who see us as property or chattel…who speak as if their adversaries as if they were not human, and who refuse to conceive of a world in which they might live together in harmony.

 I served in the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman, from 1990 – 1994.

 I served during the first Gulf War, though I did not serve in the theatre of combat where the United States armed forces and the coalition we pulled together killed three-hundred-thousand Iraqi people in the space of a few months; that is three-hundred-thousand families broken, with may hundreds of thousands more suffering in the aftermath from broken bodies and broken minds…broken hearts, and broken spirits.

 My father served for twenty-two years; the first four as a Marine, the next eighteen in the Air Force. Our nation went to war only once during my father’s period of service and the beginning of my own; we fought in Southeast Asia; my father served multiple tours of duty, Airbourne Recon, he earned multiple Purple Hearts among other commendations for duty and valor.

 He did not lead us into war, he was led there, and fought there for his sisters and brothers in arms.

 The official records from the Vietnam era states that 58,220 American servicemen and women lost their lives during the conflict (a war which we never called a war), and one in which we killed over three-million Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodians and Hmong.

 Human warfare has resulted in the deaths od many millions more human beings: men, women and children, in many other nations in the decades since the end of Vietnam and the beginning of my own enlistment, leaving millions more crippled and millions upon millions of families broken.

 We are terrible and profligate killers, we are experts at it, we Americans especially.

 Eisenhauer said that every bullet we fire, every missile we launch, that each of them is an admission of our failure as human beings, and especially of diplomacy. To paraphrase: violence does not beget peace, violence begets violence and this will never change.

 Only peace and reconciliation can bring peace and reconciliation; there is no time like the present to begin.

 Know this…peace is not a passive state, we must occupy ourselves with the pursuit it and pursue it constantly. If war is like a pernicious weed, whether it be a perennial, a self-seeder or a rhizomatic spreader, we must tend the garden and weed it…or there will be no garden for anyone.

 Remember…we are called on to love one another. We are called to pay respect to the inherent dignity of every human being, regardless of our disagreements, regardless of the pains we have endured, or caused.

 To free ourselves from the history of violence requires that we forgive one another and seek forgiveness for ourselves; if we do not, then the drumbeat of war will continue and we will be pounded into nothing by its repercussions.

 Love is the way, let it lead you out of conflict.

 If you want to honor our Veteran’s today, then commit yourself to meeting violence with love, while respecting all people (even your adversary), this is the way to hoor a Veteran, today...or any day.