May 1915. Ypres, Belgium.
On high ground overlooking a wide plain called Flanders stood John McCrae, a Canadian physician who at age 41 had volunteered for the infantry. While presiding over the funeral of a friend, he noticed that poppies grew quickly in the broken soil around the graves.
The next day, sitting on the back of a horse-drawn ambulance, he wrote “In Flanders Fields,” the seminal poem of The First World War – or perhaps any war:
In Flanders fields the poppies grow/
Between the crosses, row on row,/
That mark our place; and in the sky/
The larks, still bravely singing, fly/
Scarce heard amid the guns below./
We are the Dead. Short days ago/
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow,/
Loved and were loved, and now we lie/
In Flanders Fields./
Take up our quarrel with the foe./
To you from failing hands we throw/
The torch; be yours to hold it high./
If ye break faith with us who die/
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/
In Flanders Fields.
It was not until November 1918 — at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month － that armistice finally brought to a close The War to End All Wars.
And even today, 108 years later, Armistice Day remains one of our most resilient holidays: sealing, memorializing that awesome moment when, after ten million military personnel and seven million civilians lay dead, the big guns finally fell silent.
Men in the trenches said they could hear the Voice of God.
Yet certainly they heard that Voice no more distinctly than the men at Anzio, Tarawa and Iwo Jima; at the Pusan Perimeter and White Horse; in the Ia Drang Valley and the Central Highlands; at Fallujah, Umm Qasr and Kamdesh.
And I cannot but believe That Same Voice spoke in some manner:
To the soldier who awoke to the smell of burning flesh to realize it was his own. To the sailor who could see his leg intact … ten feet away. To the nurse with a blast in her ear and glass in her arm, struggling to breathe beneath an operating table and a dead surgeon. To the young man in new-issue fatigues, little hair and even less sleep, running, struggling with sweaty hands to hold his rifle at port arms and remember what the drill instructor had shouted at him two minutes before.
And to the peacetime recruit lifting a death-swollen mother and her infant child from a pile of corpses — American citizens all — at Jim Jones’ jungle retreat in Guyana.
Soldiers. Sailors. Airmen. Marines.
Service. Sacrifice. A nation indebted. A date kept sacred.
Yet it is not war itself that makes our nation strong.
It is our unshakable determination, our fervor to defend those values we cherish and the nation which guarantees them to us.
And within that national service, every service man or woman — as well as their parent, sister, brother, sweetheart, friend — has stories, important stories, of times our citizens have stood toward the enemy.
Stories of those you’ve kissed, then watched your loved one get on a train or plane and fade away. Stories of looking out a window, watching your previous life expire, then turning your thoughts to duty and steeling yourself for whatever comes next.
Stories of letters you wrote at the kitchen table or on an empty ammo can.
Stories of packages filled with things you’ve baked, along with a picture taken in the photo booth at the five-and-dime. Stories of mail call in the rain, then opening a battered package and, with your buddies, sharing crumbled cookies and pieces of stale cake.
Stories of labor pains. And that girlfriend rushing you to the hospital to deliver a baby whose father is on a destroyer in the South Pacific. Stories of getting that long-awaited letter with a tiny picture of a toothless baby who looks like every other baby but somehow has her mother’s eyes.
Stories of that dreaded telegram and stars in windows. Stories of American flags on coffins. Of cars pulling over to the side and people stopping on sidewalks as yet another funeral procession creeps past.
Some people — too many people — don’t tell their stories.
They believe their stories are too personal, too gruesome, unbelievable. Some stories are indeed difficult, and we stuff them down inside where they gnaw at us, festering, begging to be told.
Tell them.
Tell your husband or wife, your children and your children’s children. Tell your nieces and nephews and their children. Tell your neighbor. Tell the people at your church.
Tell anyone who will sit or stand still long enough to hear.
Because our national heritage is found not in history books, but in the stories of our citizens — personal stories of personal experiences, told in our own words.
Tell your stories.
Because in them lies the marrow of our existence, the true reason we rally to our flag, put on its uniform and serve its cause.
