Veterans Day 2025

I miss my old and dear friend Tom on Veteran's Day.  Tom was a veteran of the little spoken of and almost completely forgotten "Second Korean War" which was overshadowed at the time by events in Viet Nam and at home.  Like many veterans of that era, he served in a very dangerous place where there were no medals and not even an official recognition that a war had been fought.

We had so much and yet so little in common.  Our children grew up together.  We were deacons and lay preachers in the same little circle of churches.  We had a lot of history.  But that was where the similarities ended.  He was Army.  A grunt.  I was Navy.  A highly trained technician.  Tom had no education so speak of.  I have more education than any one man needs.  He was a fruit vendor.   One of the guys that goes house to house, business to business selling fresh fruit.  It was a hard way to make a living and he had a big family.   I was (am?) a lawyer.  I've always dressed pretty well.  Tom's daily uniform was a pair of worn jeans and plaid work shirt of some sort.   He wasn't much of an intellectual but he was a keen student of his Bible.  And he played a wicked game of chess.  In the latter years some of our best hours were spent quietly over a pot of coffee and a chessboard.  He regularly beat me in about forty moves but was always kind and humble about it.  

Every veterans day, Tom would call me up and we would hit the free meal offers at places he couldn't afford otherwise.  We would get in more than one sometimes as many as three meals but especially the Golden Corral dinner buffet.  I hated it but never let him know.  He loved it.  I'm not particularly outgoing.  Tom would strike up conversations with other vets every place we went.  

Last night, I really didn't want to eat out.  It had been a long day and I had already eaten out once.  I would just as soon have had a sandwich on the sofa in front of the TV.  But, thinking of Tom, I called Sheila and had her meet me at the Olive Garden in Broken Arrow where I claimed my free Veteran's Day dinner and we spoke a little bit about Tom.

One of the memories that haunts me on Veteran's Day are the grunts.  I did a tour of duty on a ship that was part of the massive machine feeding infantrymen into the meat grinder of Viet Nam.  Every few weeks we would embark with four hundred or so mostly fresh from boot camp newly minted Marine grunts who as soon as they had completed their amphibious training and jungle training would be fed into units in Viet Nam as replacements.  

They were loud, annoying and could be dangerous.  But, they were also lonely and scared even though they wouldn't admit it.  While nobody talked about it everybody knew that within a year somewhere between five and ten percent of them would be dead and that many more at least would be wounded and seriously affected for the rest of their lives.  Over twenty five percent of the casualties in Viet Nam were Marines.

The saddest part of it all was that they were mostly teenagers.  High school kids who should have been chasing girls, working on old cars, feeling their way into manhood and building the foundation for a good life.  But, manhood was thrust upon them early and for the most part they shouldered the burden quite well.  Their junior officers were college kids in uniform.  The average life expectancy of a platoon leader in Viet Nam was never more than two weeks and was often measured in minutes.  We killed off a generation of our best and brightest in that unforgivable war and permanently damaged the country in the process. 

I don't care much for flag waving and sentimental speeches on Veteran's Day.  I am  offended by the artificial sentimentality hawked by many designed to make the crowd feel good about themselves.  It cheapens the sacrifices.  I prefer to quietly remember the guys like Tom who was a friend closer than a brother and the masses of teenage green grunts facing a very uncertain future with what amounted to, for them at least, dignity, honor and devotion to duty.