I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
I am listening to a podcast on WWI that was discussing the spontaneous Christmas day cease fires and exchanges along the Western Front in the first year of the war. French and German troops exchanged chocolates and cigarettes, and sang Christmas songs together. Hours before this, any hand raised above the trench would have been shot off in moments. Days later, the soldiers got back to the business of slaughtering each other.
My understanding of what Vonnegut is saying, is that there is no sense in honoring veterans. Anyone that fights in an armed conflict is a veteran. It is a dumb idea to honor that. My father fought in Vietnam. My impression was that he saw the veteran experience as one that concerned veterans. IMO his emotions and thoughts on the matter were so complex that they could only be diminished and distorted by our decision to honor them.
IMO the best thing about honoring veterans, is that people typically shut up and listen to them for a moment. Veterans fill in by choice or not when we are too lazy or too apathetic or too stupid or too scared and people are going to die on our behalf.