29 May, 2023
Today announces for many veterans the annual resurgence of some measure of guilt for having survived a conflict that one's peers did not, then the greater guilt of being relieved about it. This is not, nor will ever be, about them. It is about the man, almost still a child himself, who willingly positioned himself between an innocent and an aggressor and offered protection with his own body. The infantryman who, knowing the next step into no man's land was probably his last, took it anyway and fell. The woman who signed up as a single mom and learned during her first deployment that truck drivers had highest casualty rates of all jobs in the Army, yet still accepted the position of second vehicle in the convoy, never reaching her destination. It is about the father who, young wife and children awaiting him at home, crashes through the door of a house where his own Soldiers just went down, and never comes out again. The beleaguered souls huddled in trenches who went over the top...