Letter: Thank you to all veterans

Posted 11/20/17

The emotional legacies are different for different countries. Veterans’ Day can sometimes recall the lyrical longing in the famous last paragraph of “The Great Gatsby,” with a lot …

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Letter: Thank you to all veterans

Posted

The emotional legacies are different for different countries. Veterans’ Day can sometimes recall the lyrical longing in the famous last paragraph of “The Great Gatsby,” with a lot of “if onlys” implied.

World War I also began a tradition of memorializing ordinary soldiers by name and burying them alongside their officers — a posthumous recognition of the individual after the trauma of mass slaughter.

Perhaps an engraved stone over one’s remains represents an effort, a last ditch stand, as it were, to achieve immortality. Sometimes possibly an attempt to lay claim to achievement. Sometimes the positioning of the grave carries into death a poignancy that existed in life.

But a grave tells nothing about its occupants’ wit, tragedy, daring and courage. You live in a world of mourning and loss. About the meaning of death and dying. About the nature of God and the after-life.

The poppy is one of the most obvious inheritances of World War I. Made famous in the 1915 poem by Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae: “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row, that mark our place …” The short poem was written as a eulogy and a call to solidarity from the dead to the living that they not “break the faith with us who die.”

The reason that they do is that human nature is not that different now than it was with the Greeks and the Egyptians. The same emotions and the same sacrifice. What changes is the context in which those things are played out.

We learn from one another a certainty. At departure, the dying want love in the room. Live well, die beloved.

In case we forget that universal lesson, let history’s war stories be a poignant reminder. Every veteran was once a tender, innocent, defenseless child. They told me they were with buddies who promised each other no one would be left behind.

You see, it’s a love you don’t experience anywhere else and you never forget it.

Greatness, it’s just something we made up. Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift reserved for a chosen few. The prodigies, the superstars and the rest of us can only stand by watching. 

You can forget that. Greatness is not some rare DNA strand. Greatness is not more unique to us than breathing. We’re all capable of it. All of us.

Our veterans, they, their loss and their meaning, belong to the nation. Death must be thought about in order to live well. There they join my parents to leave me here, alone, the last one standing of the tight unit of my youth, which I remember with such exquisite sadness.

This Veterans’ Day, tell some stories, probably cry some and laugh some, and reaffirm the belief that there was no one quite like them.

If you disagree with me, raise your hand right now at home. Thank you to all veterans. Semper Fi.

Ronald Raposa

16 Rosita Ave., Bristol

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