Capitol Hill Blue Forums Hot Topics & Breaking News The RoundTable Veteran's Day Round Table, November 11th, 2008

Not really here yet, but the following was linked on one of my other group sites. I teared up--while grinning. And it's apppropriate for Veterans' Day.

mental health break

You didn't ask, but I'm glad to tell... you all about Gay Veterans.

An interesting note... the man considered to be the founder of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, second only to George Washington himself, Major General von Steuben was a homosexual... you can google homosexual and Baron von Steuben for sources. Also, it was during the Revolutionary War that the first soldier was court marshaled for sodomy- Lt. Gotthold Enslin.

Not to mention the subject of one of my favorite movies of all time, Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence was said to "go with boys." Other military giants of history such as Alexander the Great, Hadrian, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionhearted, Montezuma, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great and perhaps the whole of the Spartan Army have also been recorded as not necessarily being gay by today's "standards," but definitely having more-than-platonic relationships with other men.

It is our Gay and Lesbian soldiers who have to sacrifice a little extra piece of themselves to protect and defend a country that vilifies them. I may think it a very f*cked up thing we ask of our fellow humans, to participate in acts of war, but from my own reality tunnel, I salute them.

Kisses and salams,
F&N

ps/fyi... if war is stupid and if nationalism is stupid, then patriotism is down-right absurd. The fact that we kill each other over arbitrary lines draw on paper based on who owned what long ago... argh, it just frustrates me to no end. I'm going to go ponder quantum theory and try to create a world without this madness...

I have grown up referring to today as Armistice Day. Link

Once again it is grey and raining here in Vancouver. In a few hours the Remembrance Ceremony Music will drone and the clink of the medals of very elderly men who fought in WWII will reinforce the respect for those we are remembering.


They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
we will remember them.
--Lawrence Binyon


Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

--Wilfred Owen


To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now,
ask why?: W. H. Auden: "Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier"


Survivors
No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're 'longing to go out again,' —
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Siegfried Sassoon

Rain and Remembrance

Ypers, Passchendale, The Somme, Verdun, Mons...
names engraved in my DNA
...and when the bagpipes wail
as the wind and the ever-present rain...

as bitter as any that fell in the Somme and Ypers...

soaks through the grey flannel pants
of the old men on their last legs
as they stand at attention crying silently and unashamedly,
remembering fallen comrades.

The haunting call of 'The Last Post' rings out over the brap-brap
of restored Curtiss, Fokker, and Sopwith engines,
flying in broken wing formation over the silent city.

Two minutes of silence...

on the 11th day of the 11th month...

the haunting words flood back to everyone....

" ...at the going down of the sun,
and in the morning,
we shall remember them...."

And the young boy-soldiers,
in uniform,
stand straight,
having been informed this is officially "important",
but too young to understand why
these old men are crying
when they have been honoured.

And they understand even less...
when they see them, hours later, blind drunk in messes
all over the city... crying and laughing,
into the unending drinks
those who remember have bought for them .

JF

For me one of the most moving tributes to the terrible costs of war is Benjamin Britten's [i]War Requiem[/i] which in part uses the anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen.

I am having a hard time with Veteran's Day this year...I would feel less bitter, I think, were we not continually making more war veterans.

So I'll turn to another topic.
The following quote is flying around Omaha email - no clue where it originated (probably not here) -

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama ran so our children can fly."

I couldn't figure out where else it would fit so I'm putting it here.

I can't really relate to the veteran's day. Nobody in my family has ever served in US armed forces and when my family served in Romanian army (every male 18 year old had to serve prior to 1990), none of them were involved in a war.

But this day is to pay respect to those that have served and even gave their lives in the armed forces. I won't go as far as saying that they died protecting our freedoms because I personally don't agree with all the wars fought in the past 50 or so years.

Is this the future White House dog?

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4757466a4560.html

Thank you Julia. I just got back from working out at the gym and had an e-mail from a writer friend of mine. His brother "woke up dead" this morning. That is Rick-speak for the fact that his 67 year old brother with no previous health issued died in his sleep last night.

All of life is so temporary. All we really have is today. I'll dwell on that quote Julia. It will become my mantra to get me through today!

Kathy

Kap17

I think it is possible you might relate better to Canadians, the Brits and the Aussies. We celebrate today as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. We remind ourselves never to forget and all hold two minutes of silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of thee eleventh month in Remembrance of the end of "The Great War'"

My parents were both enlisted by the end of September 1939. What took the US so long? In Canada and Great Britain, every family had someone enlisted. A goodly number lost a family member.

I realize Romania fought on both sides in WWII, but today it is about remembering the dead, not the political.

Come off it, Martha. You're not that naive. Don't ya think they planned it that way?