Today

It's Veterans Day and I don’t know what to say. Rather, I’m not a veteran and feel that anything I might say will come off as trite, 2-dimensional, clueless or, possibly, insulting. I'd RILLY, truly like to avoid the hell outta that.

Back when I was in high school, I’d occasionally go over to the local college’s student center to people watch, draw and escape my violently turbulent famiglia. Back then, the only people wearing olive drab were vets. Camo had yet to become a cosplay fashion statement. I’d draw and study them (surreptitiously? prolly not). This was at the tail end of the war in Viet Nam. They were so very different from all the other college students. Even when laughing, their eyes looked haunted. 

 Of fucking course they were! 

I was just a dumb kid – I knew so little of the world. These, mostly, men seemed to hold great, painful knowledge. I wanted to know more. I wanted to sit with them – absorb and observe. I wanted to hear their stories, gain enlightenment but I was afraid. Why would these world weary, seen-things-you-people-wouldn’t-believe men tolerate my presence, let alone talk to me?

The Amazing Bob did two tours of ‘Nam with the Air Force (or Air Farce as he called it). TAB had an incredibly low draft number so he signed up in order to avoid the Army and total cannon fodder status.

He came home with a big ‘ol case of PTSD that landed him in the VA Hospital for six months. After he got out, he joined Viet Nam Veterans Against the War.

Kevin Scott was in George I’s Iraq War and came back with a variant of hepatitis that killed him.

On Twitter, I follow a lot of vets. Why? The ones I follow have a dark shade of humor that I can relate to. Their wit and wisdom are knife sharp.

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
~ José Narosky

While I’ve experienced my own share of trauma and abuse, it’s NOT the same as what a soldier, someone who’s been to war, has experienced. That’s not to say or imply that one is greater or lesser than the other. They’re just not parallel.

The phrase stay in your own lane comes to mind.  

Kevin once said that war consisted of long periods of boredom, interspersed with episodes of extreme terror. Words to that effect anyway.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
~ Bertrand Russell

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
~ Albert Einstein

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
~ Jimmy Carter