Veteran's Day 2025
Another year has come and gone...
This cemetery is for the casualties suffered in the India-Burma campaigns of 1941-45. It’s also a tiger reserve.
When you go home
Tell them of us and say,
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.
Allied Cemetery, North Assam, India
This is the Kohima Epitaph, first carved in stone here in India, but now it’s everywhere from Canada to Tasmania.
Yes, I know; today is supposed to be for the living vets, but somehow, the very idea of this graphic irks me.
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Simonides of Ceos
These guys died at Thermopylae, where King Leonidas of Sparta, his 300 bodyguards, and as many as another 7,000 Greeks held off somewhere between 25,000 and 300,000 Persian Empire troops (sources vary) for three days in the late summer of 480 BC. Ain’t nothing happy about the sacrifice they made to save the rest of the Greek cities for a season.
Whatever you do, don’t thank us for the service we did.
It was what we were supposed to do, and that doesn’t make us heroes, though God knows there are enough heroes among us. Buy us a drink or a cup of coffee, volunteer at a VA hospital, fly a national flag, cut our grass, shovel our snow, treat us with respect…
“Thank you for your service” feels gratuitous.
Yeah, I rant once in a while.