Today, we salute the Veterans of the United States of America. Your service and sacrifice are and were extraordinary. A personal thank you to my father, my brother, my ex-stepbrother, my neighbors, and a whole slew of ex-boyfriends.
But thanks most of all to my grandfather, who was part of the greatest generation. In case you haven’t seen it, this is a little of his story.
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I didn’t see my father’s parents much when I was growing up. They lived in Colorado, then Hawaii, then Colorado again. I sent them letters when I was young, and perhaps they visited us once every year. When Big Brother hit high school, they flew him out to Hawaii for several weeks in the summer. The next year Future Doctor Sister got to go, and finally it was my turn… Click to keep reading.
Veterans day was something unknown to me untill I moved away from Germany. In Germany soldiers and veterans have a very very low social status and talking about something like that is not a topic anyone likes for some reasons…
Anyways the former German Minister (back in 2012) of Defence tried to get a Veterans Day but all other parties were against “glorifying” soldiers (OMG).
In Finland it is totally different even though Finland was on the losing end as a former Axis power. Veterans (WWII that is) get nearly everything for free and are honored like gods in the army 😮
I had a German history professor who served during the cold war, and he said much the same — he and the other draftees had no respect for the officers or career soldiers and did everything they could to sabotage them. “In retrospect,” he once told me, “it was a good thing there never was a war.”