Today is a day to reflect on what veterans and the military have brought to our country.
Today is a day to reflect on what veterans and the military have brought to our country. Yes, they have fought for freedom in grand world wars. They were scouring the remote mountain valleys of Afghanistan. They surged into Iraq to bring a semblance of sectarian peace after toppling a dictator. Veterans serve as our nation’s disaster backbone as seen so clearly during the aftermath of hurricanes and natural disasters.
Right now, however, the media coverage of the military’s heroic efforts here at home and the devastating toll that their service took on our young in Iraq and Afghanistan is appallingly lacking.
I celebrate their service.
I am a product of a military life — my father was a colonel in the Air Force. As a child, I lived at military bases from Montgomery, Alabama, to Naples, Italy. I went to Department of Defense schools and attended college on an Army ROTC scholarship. While on duty, I served four years in the post-Vietnam military in Germany, first guarding nuclear weapons and, finally, briefing generals.
Back then, I was in a military that had a much closer relationship to the nation’s citizens. I lived in a military populated by an Army, Navy, and Air Force drafted nationwide. The army was predominately young men drafted from their mothers to fight in foreign lands. I lived in a country where Representatives and Senators asked questions about everyday issues of the military, driven by concerned mothers and fathers worried about their children’s welfare.
In those days, fighting wars and coming home dead was far more personal to Americans. War, then, was against the fabric of our country, something extreme, something so important and of such a danger to us that it required the blood of our young.
The military used to be remarkable.
Today, the draft is no more. That visceral and countrywide bond between the nation’s mothers against the inscription of their young is not the same. Today, with a volunteer army, our nation has grown to recognize the military as another everyday arm of politics and international relations.
At Walter Reed Hospital, outside of our nation’s capital, soldiers wounded in Afghanistan, with faces disfigured, brain injuries, and legs blown away, lie fighting for their lives and relearning how to walk with prosthetics. The national media all but forget them. The horrors of war still affect the families of the military, but do not seem to affect the soul of the nation, because they are no longer protested by mothers across the country and splashed across TV screens, computer monitors, and newspapers as they once were.
When military reserve and National Guard members across the country mobilize to help natural disaster victims, forming up with their units more than 3,000 miles from home to assist their fellow Americans, it has become an everyday headline.
Whenever the Navy anchors amphibious ships off the New York/New Jersey coastline to fly non-stop rescue missions, their heroics barely make the news. Soldiers, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen work feverishly helping storm victims. In retirement, they rebuild damaged areas. And when the veterans provide food and fuel, it is treated as a simple disaster news footnote.
Unfortunately, the military is taken for granted today.
Travelers focus on flight schedules, re-booking flights and getting to meetings on time. They rarely realize that without the day-round efforts of soldiers, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, the New York City airports would never have regrouped as quickly. Plus, the international order that allows us freedom to travel would never be as it is.
I hope that on this Veterans Day everyone stops to consider the sacrifices that our military makes every day for the benefit of society. Today we celebrate the winning of wars from days of yore. We also recognize the amazing and heroic service of the men and women of our armed forces in far-flung lands and right here at home.
Better yet, they should be thanked every day.
Photos from US Marines and US Army websites
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Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
