The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

Today, for the first time in twenty-one years, my country isn't making veterans, at least not in any "official" foreign wars.

Oh, sure. Hundreds of GIs of one stripe or another are doing the nation's dirty business - some of it dangerous, as well - in various unpaved parts of the world for some nebulous "national interests" that your average Joe and Molly Lunchpail couldn't identify if they sat on their hands and thought about it for a fortnight.

But the "big wars" of the post-9/11, Post-Gulf-War 1 era?

Done.

And, look! 

Suddenly all that "support the troops" guff? 

It's disappeared like magic, melted like a fallen ice cream cone on a hot summer sidewalk. I didn't see a single Veterans Day ad, didn't hear so much as a whispered "thank you for your service" today. 

Those who gave their youth and strength in the wars their fellow citizens either helped gin up or were at least indifferent to those who ginned them up? 

As invisible as Marley's Ghost was to the suffering poor.

It is as it has always been; "Danger past and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted".

But that's fine. 

That's what happens after wars, if there is an "after" to the wars. The worst part about the "War on Terror" was there never was an "after". 

For years and years I wrote on this day of the seemingly endless trickle of maimed and dead that we brought home, unresolved, and the fields of maimed and dead (and widowed and orphaned and sown with ruin and merciless hatred) we left behind us abroad.

That was the most awful thing; that for years my nation learned nothing and yet forgot nothing, carelessly devouring its' own and others' children like the Titan Kronos.

Well. that's done. 

For now, anyway.

Mind you, I don't expect that my fellow citizens have learned anything from the dark and bloody tale of our Adventures in Politics By Other Means. The next time some irksome foreigner pokes us in the giggy I'm sure the Great American Public can be counted on to rise in righteous wrath, wrapped in the flag and roaring that gawdawful "God Bless The USA" song, demanding that someone - someone else, mind you - go smite the dusky foe.

But at least, for now, we're nominally at peace.

And I'll take that.

Because, as Herodotus wrote: "No man is so foolish as to desire war more than peace: for in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."

I wish you and all of yours a peaceful day full of small joys.

And to those of my brothers and sisters who also once wore the particolored clothes; 

Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead.