re: #4 austin_blue

CL’d:

re: #47 Shiplord Kirel: Fan of USPS, Goodyear, and Oreo

Tomorrow is Veterans’ Day

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Everywhere else, tomorrow is Remembrance Day, the end of WW1. As a veteran, I get real tired, real fast, of having November 11 being highjacked to slobber over Vets when everyone in Europe is acknowledging the death of 1/3 of a generation, another 1/3 of a generation who were wounded, and the other lucky 1/3 who weren’t wounded but often suffered grueling psych wounds.

I went to the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle on my first trip there in 2007. I walked in, looked at the dead- the sheer fucking *number* of dead recorded on the walls, Unit by Unit. and sat down and cried my eyes out for half an hour. Docents came up to me and asked if I was OK. I just shook my head and said “I had no idea what this small country sacrificed.”

I was absolutely bereft.

Well, we have a separate Memorial Day in this country. It would not be appropriate for us to attach this to November 11 the same way Europeans do, since our losses were so much less than theirs in the war that ended on that date. France, with less than half the US population, had 11 times as many war dead, Britain 8 times as many.
I have never been to the Scottish memorial but I have been to the Douaumont Ossuary on the Verdun battlefield. The dead are actually visible there, with the bones of about a quarter of a million unidentified soldiers from both sides piled in crypts that branch off the main corridor. The identified dead are buried in gigantic, beautifully landscaped cemeteries near by.
The Verdun battlefield is a national forest now, since the land is so blasted and cratered that it cannot be cultivated and thousands of unexploded shells are still buried in the ground there. French army EOD teams go out every so often to deal with rusty shells that have been squeezed to the surface. They will remain dangerous for at least another hundred years, maybe longer. The forest rangers still find human remains almost every week. They are cataloged and added to the ossuary.