Veterans Day

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

War is the greatest of humanity’s crimes against itself. We prove ourselves, year after bloody year, enthusiastic serial killers. For money. For land. For God and country.

Unsurprisingly then, perhaps, Veterans Day, like Memorial Day, and even the Fourth of July, always makes me a little uncomfortable. We’re supposed to honor, and give our thanks to, the men and women whose lives are used and often sacrificed by their leaders for those causes.

Most of the men and women well deserve the honor; some of their leaders do not.

Beside the fourteen thousand lies the current Commander-in-Chief has told them, stands one frank truth he has graciously shared: that if they die in the Middle East, it will not be to protect democracy, but to protect the oil.

So I have mixed feeling on days like this.

My own military service was insignificant, in time and in space. Barely a year. It has stayed with me all the years after. In mostly small ways.

Fifty years, and I still wear my dress shirts in a military tuck; make my bed with military corners. Still write the date 11 Nov 2019. Still carry any burden in my left hand to leave my right free to salute.

Still carry, too, one brief memory of war. We murdered a village. One of many during the secret bombing of Cambodia. The after-action photographs were worse than the bombing. A soundless shrieking horror of scorched and shredded old men, women, children. A baby’s blackened lips still attached to the breast of its mother’s torso, which wasn’t attached to anything at all.

Years later, I was taught a Buddhist practice that involved visualizing myself standing on the shore of a river, and being greeted on that shore by the lineage of people whose lives led to my own. My teachers, my friends, my relations, my own sweet mother. All the people I had known.

But those were not the people who greeted me.

In my visualization, I stood by the river, and there appeared, next to me, not my mother, not my grandparents, not my friends, not all the people I had loved, but the Cambodian bombing dead, men, women, children, all the dead, more than a hundred of them.

This Veterans Day, and every day, I remember the dead. All the dead, standing with me on the riverbank.

Thank you for your service.