Remembering the heroes on Veterans Day
On Veterans Day, Nov. 11, Santa Fe once again did what it does so well — commemorate the sacrifices of the men and women who have served our country in the armed forces (“Honoring ‘selfless devotion,’ ” Nov. 12). There was a marching band, a lineup of classic cars, floats, several hundred participants (mostly veterans and their families) and, once arrived at the Bataan Memorial Building, prayers and patriotic speeches which won the warm applause of all. Often, woven into caps and jackets of the veterans were the names of places that would always be alive in their memories — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.
But this Veterans Day was unique. It was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, a war that resulted in over 29 million battlefield casualties and took the lives of 26,000 Americans in the Meuse-Argonne offensive alone.
My grandfather, Edwin Williamson, was one of the many thousands of American soldiers who enlisted and fought in France. I have in my hand a faded studio portrait, undoubtedly meant for his family, friends and probably girlfriends (he had a rakish reputation) that had been taken before he left our hometown in East Texas. He is standing proudly in his doughboy uniform with a large American flag behind him, an artifact of a vanished time, yes, but emblematic of an innocence that was soon to be lost in the fierce battles that would come and the price that would be paid for this new, hard-earned knowledge about our country’s place in the world.
My grandfather survived the war but with only a few threads of his old life intact. He was mortally wounded, not before the armistice at 11 a.m. Nov. 11, but a few hours afterward. He served as a dispatch rider called to deliver a message to an American unit. However, neither he nor it knew that the war had ended. So, unknowingly, these young Americans were engaged in their last battle. As the fighting wore on, the Germans launched a lethal poison gas attack that despite my grandfather’s mobility, he was unable to escape.
He returned to his home shattered in health until he died at the age of 26. In the course of the ceremonies of this Veterans Day, I thought of his short life and death, of my father’s service throughout World War II, and his death in a plane crash at the height of the Cold War. I remembered my own much more modest service (I was an administrator) in a 400-bed military hospital filled with the broken bodies and too-often damaged minds of those wounded in Vietnam, and
my stepson in the military who has been deployed nine times. I thought of them all.
Like so many American families, we were committed to serving our country — sometimes with a blind patriotism but always with a commitment to what we steadfastly believed was the “last best hope of humankind,” which, as we have learned, can require vigorous criticism but also the committed and sustained civic participation necessary for the health of our democracy in these perilous times.
As this day of remembering closed, I learned about our commander in chief ’s visit to France to commemorate the sacrifices of the American dead of World
War I. Unlike the leaders of France and Germany, he was unable to attend the American ceremonies because he was afraid of … the rain.