Honouring those who served

 

It’s hard to imagine, for the youth of our time, how veterans, once young people themselves, went off to a war they didn’t conceive.

My father was a young teen when the Second World War raged in Europe and beyond. He saw young men, older than himself, in uniform, and he told us, in our parents' collected stories, how handsome they looked, yet he never told us and perhaps didn’t know of the brokenness in those young men who returned home at the end of the war.

Not long after my father turned 16, as a young man living on a farm, the war ended. And although my dad as the youngest could have been called on to serve, he was not required to do so after all. I'm grateful he was spared.

A friend of mine who looked after her father in his last years of life recalled nights of terror for an old man reliving war memories. Make no mistake, being in the war fighting was no glorious thing, not proud as watching young men and women in uniform going off to serve their country in whatever capacity they were able.

A late minister of our home church worked as a cook on a ship as a young man. He told us stories in our confirmation class of how that ship was cleaned until it shone, and of meals he cooked in that navy vessel.

And we could listen to an account from a storyteller who made famous an imagined tale of a truce on Christmas Eve—just a short one—for the soldiers to take a short break from fighting. It didn’t really happen like that.

Even those not in the midst of fighting could tell stories—people who ran for their lives, or whose home was taken over by soldiers. We heard a few of those stories in our lifetime and many of them were challenged in telling it, recounting the emotions that went along with it. Something I do not know of, but honoured their true stories nonetheless.

A war, no matter whose conflict it is, is not a glorious thing, and those who did serve their country—to keep the freedoms we know and experience—gave more than you or me and lost more than both of us. 

I cannot imagine the horrors because I did not live them, and I would prefer not to, but I do acknowledge in the wearing of my poppy this week that others did and many never returned, but perished.

A memorial exists in a Guelph downtown church of Colonel John McCrae who wrote In Flanders Fields. The McCrae family had attended that church, one I imagine that was solemn as they learned that another one of their young bright men had died. That would have happened in countless places across Canada.

In Flanders fields the poppies grow…”

Let us not forget this November 11^th the democracy and freedoms we have that were so dearly bought. Let us remember that.

 

Carolyn R. Wilker, editor, author and storyteller

https://www.carolynwilker.ca/about/