Posted on 11/11/2017 5:49:27 AM PST by Rummyfan
I spent much of the morning before Veterans Day in various TV green rooms with a whole lot of vets, and also a young lady whose father died in Iraq in 2006. She is rightly proud of the dad she lost when she was barely old enough to know him, and he would certainly be very proud of the way his young daughter has turned out. But I wonder more and more whether our society is worthy of the terrible sacrifices of so very few. For Remembrance Day around the Commonwealth and Veterans Day in the United States, we present this piece from 16 years ago - the first November 11th after September 11th (as anthologized in my book The Face Of The Tiger). I can't precisely pinpoint the moment when "the day that everything changed" changed again and consigned the post-9/11 era to history, to the rear-view mirror of a fast receding past. But this is how it was in those first, vivid weeks of a new war:
On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy — not a real poppy, but a stylized, mass-produced thing of red paper and green plastic that, as the Prime Minister explained, is worn in Britain and other Commonwealth countries in the days before November 11th. They're sold in the street by aged members of the Royal British Legion to commemorate that moment 83 years ago today, when on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns fell silent on the battlefields of Europe.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Still our best writer/commentator and his oldies are great on reread as well.
Steyn is a treasure. If all immigrants could be like Steyn, we would be a better nation. And Remembrance Sunday in Britain, is truly revered as a sacred day. I WISH more people in this country had a sense of history and admired/honored those who died for our freedoms.
When I see something written by Mark Steyn, I can easily delay my schedule just enough to read it with pleasure. His use of descriptions and quotes always manages to touch a nerve.
Mark Steyn seems like an incarnation of Bruce Catton (Civil War historian). The way he uses these descriptions and quotes makes you feel like you are there...or want to be.
All honorably discharged vets can now shop at the exchanges, via the internet.
Go on line and scan your copy of your discharge paper into the system. Gmail worked the best for me versus Comcast.
https://www.shopmyexchange.com
During my 2nd tour in US Army Europe in the mid-80’s my family and I took a vacation to Belgium and Holland. We visited the Ypers Battlefield and a rebuilt section of trench where the author of “In Flander’s Fields” wrote the poem. The area there is very flat and still would be water soaked if not for the drainage ditches. And quite thought provoking for a soldier.
I got lost in Belgium once and we ended up in Bastogne. It’s awe-inspiring in the biblical sense to walk around those battlefields and see all the memorials. Thousands gave their lives to fight evil in a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere. It seems we’ve lost the heart for such battles. Europe now welcomes evil and feeds her children to the invading hordes.
What would those silent men say to their progeny who squander their sacrifice and trade freedom for license?
Camp Cody, New Mexico paid tribute to the millions of horses, donkeys,
and mules killed serving in WWI.
were sitting ducks as they went over the top....
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