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  • Remembrence day

    Today is Remembrence day Australians remember those who have died in war.

    In 1918 the armistice that ended World War I came into force, bringing to an end four years of hostilities that saw 61 919 Australians die at sea, in the air, and on foreign soil. Few Australian families were left untouched by the events of World War I - 'the war to end all wars' most had lost a father, son, daughter, brother, sister or friend.

    At 11am on 11 November we pause to remember the sacrifice of those men and women who have died or suffered in wars and conflicts and all those who have served during the past 100 years.
    Remembrance Day index page
    ================================================== =======
    I was at the local service today and found an old school mate there with his teenage kids. After talking to him I discovered that as late as this year, he found out that his great, great uncle was one of the soldiers killed in France in WW1. He also found out that his Grand Father was injured in France and brought home and died in a mental institution from suicide due to "shell shock" now PTSD . His family kept all references to his relatives war service secret as they believed that coming back from the war with no visible signs of injury was something to be ashamed of.

    It's such a travesty that the thinking back then was so different to what it is now. The idea that you're less a man because you can't mentally handle the things that happen at war, seeing the killing or doing the killing.

    War is a horrible thing that must be avoided at all costs, BUT, sometimes you have to do things to protect your way of life, your freedom and sometimes you and your families life so we go to war and don't consider the consequences until later, sometimes much later and in some cases to the detriment of your own life.

    I suffer from PTSD due to nine years of doing Road Accident Rescue work. I saw some horrific things, some badly mutilated bodies and even some very close friends killed due to someone else's stupidity.

    What I have been through through pales into insignificance compared to those who fought in different wars in far off lands and to those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice.

    To all you people who went to war for your country, for what you believe in, for freedom, I offer a huge thank you and gratitude that I will never be able to repay. To those who never returned, we will never forget your sacrifice, not just in WW1, but for all wars and conflicts.

    To all those who are in war zones at the moment, I for one support you in your effort. no matter what your political view or idea of "should we be there", they are there and must be supported. The servicemen and women who returned from WW1, WW2 were hero's, but those who went to Vietnam were treated like lepers. I personally know of 2 ex Vietnam diggers who took their own lives due to PTSD and the way they were treated when they returned.

    Let's not have another episode like that.

    Lest we forget
    Never hold your farts in, they run up your spine, and that's where shity ideas come from.
    vēnī, vīdī, velcro - I came, I saw I stuck around.

  • #2
    We will remember them.

    Comment


    • #3
      Some of us will, anyway.

      Comment


      • #4
        Quite good:

        REMEMBRANCE DAY
        Seasons of Steyn
        Sunday, 11 November 2007
        This was written for the first November 11th of a new war - Veterans Day and Remembrance Day, 2001.

        On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy — not a real poppy, but a stylized, mass-produced thing of red paper and green plastic that, as the Prime Minister explained, is worn in Britain and other Commonwealth countries in the days before November 11th. They’re sold in the street by aged members of the Royal British Legion to commemorate that moment 83 years ago today, when on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns fell silent on the battlefields of Europe.

        The poppy is an indelible image of that “war to end all wars”, summoned up by a Canadian, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, in a poem written in the trenches in May 1915:

        In Flanders fields the poppies blow
        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.

        Row on row on row. And, in between, thousands of poppies, for they bloom in uprooted soil. Sacrifice on the scale McCrae witnessed is all but unimaginable in the west today — in Canada, in Britain, even apparently in America, which instead of sending in the cavalry is now dropping horse feed for the Northern Alliance, in the hope they might rouse themselves to seize an abandoned village or two, weather permitting.

        Nonetheless, though we can scarce grasp what they symbolize, this year the poppies are hard to find. Three Canadian provinces had sold out by last Monday, and by the time you read this the rest of the Royal Canadian Legion’s entire stock of 14.8 million will likely be gone. That’s not bad for a population that barely touches 30 million and includes large numbers of terrorist cells plus the students at Montreal’s Concordia University who openly celebrated the attacks on the World Trade Center. Evidently, the public has made a connection between September 11th and November 11th, though no one seems quite sure what is: A general expression of solidarity with the victims? Or a renewed respect for the men who gave their lives so we could get fat and complacent and read celebrity features about Britney?

        We are the Dead. Short days ago
        We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
        Loved and were loved, and now we lie
        In Flanders fields.

        This year, President Bush has declared the week of Veterans’ Day to be National Veterans Awareness Week, which is just a terrible name and makes America’s armed forces sound like a disease (“National Breast Cancer Awareness Week”). He’s also announced an initiative to get every school, in the week ahead, to invite a veteran to come and speak to students. A fine idea, but one likely to run into problems in a culture where not just tony bastions like Harvard but many less elevated outlets of academe decline to permit the ROTC on campus.

        When Oxbow High School in the small North Country town of Bradford, Vermont mooted a JROTC program, the proposal was quickly shot down by the usual activists protesting JROTC’s policies on gays. (JROTC doesn’t have any policy on gays — that’s the problem.) “Being a teenager,” said one middle-aged graying hippy-dippy Vermonter, “is not about wearing a uniform and fitting in. It’s about standing up and declaring who you are.” There speaks the voice of the eternally adolescent Boomer in all its woeful self-absorption.

        Actually, most Americans are already “aware” of their veterans, it’s the elites who need reminding — like the chaps at The New York Times and other big papers who carry (by my estimation) less than a tenth of the military obituaries Britain’s Daily Telegraph does. True, NBC’s star anchor, Tom Brokaw, has found himself a lucrative franchise cranking out books about “The Greatest Generation” — the World War Two generation — but Brokaw’s designation is absurd and essentially self-serving. The youthful Americans who went off to war 60 years ago would have thought it ridiculous to be hailed as “the greatest”. They were unexceptional: they did no more or less than their own parents and grandparents had done. Like young men across the world, they accepted soldiering as an obligation of citizenship, as men have for centuries. In 1941, it would have astonished them to be told they would be the last generation to respect that basic social compact.

        They understood that there are moments in a nation’s history when even being a teenager is about standing up and declaring who you are by wearing a uniform. When we — their children and grandchildren — ennoble them as “the greatest” and elevate them into something extraordinary, it’s a reflection mainly of our own stunted perspective.

        So for many of us “sacrifice” is all but incomprehensible. Responding to Robert Putnam’s recollections of “civic community” in World War Two — “victory gardens in nearly everyone’s backyard, the Boy Scouts at filling stations collecting floor mats for scrap rubber, the affordable war bonds, the practice of giving rides to hitchhiking soldiers and war workers” - Katha Pollitt in the current edition of The Nation sneers: “Those would be certified heterosexual, Supreme-Being-believing scouts, I suppose, and certified harmless and chivalrous hitchhiking GIs, too - not some weirdo in uniform who cuts you to bits on a dark road.” Somehow I don’t think poor paranoid Ms Pollitt has met that many fellows in uniform, weirdoes or otherwise.

        To the broader constituency for which Katha speaks, those guys in uniform are weirdoes — not because they want to cut her to bits but because they’re willing to go and slog it out on some foreign hillside, getting limbs blown off by grenades, blinded by shrapnel — and for no other reason than something so risible as “love of country”!

        Today, across the western world, the generals dislike conscript armies. They want light, highly trained, professional regiments. But it’s hard not to feel that the end of the draft — the end of routine military service — has somehow weakened the bonds of citizenship.

        Citizenship is about allegiance. We benefit from our rights as citizens of the state and in return we accept our duties as citizens of the state. And let’s not be embarrassed about supposedly obsolescent concepts like the “nation-state”. If we’ve learned anything since September 11th, it’s that, if it were left to the multilateral acronyms — the UN, EU, even Nato — Osama bin Laden would have the run of the planet. The great evil of September 11th is being resisted by a small number of nation-states, by the United States, the United Kingdom and a handful of others. Ultimately, it is as Americans or Britons, Australians or Canadians that we resist the assault on our liberties.

        But how do we play our part in this war? Hug your children, advised the President, and shop till you drop. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your outlet mall. But, for most Americans, that’s not enough. They’re ready to do more, and Mr Bush isn’t giving a lead. We may not be asked to scramble up over a trench and across a muddy field in Flanders, but it’s all too possible we may be called upon to demonstrate great heroism close to home, as the firemen of New York and the passengers of Flight 93 were. They are the Dead. They lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved. They did not deserve their premature deaths. But they join the untold legions who helped the Union win the Civil War, the Americans and the British Empire win the Great War, and the Allies the Second World War. And every single American alive today — including Katha Pollitt — enjoys the blessings of those victories.

        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 with us who die
        We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
        In Flanders fields.

        In Thursday’s otherwise unsatisfactory speech, the President finally used the words he should have spoken a month ago, the last words of Todd Beamer before he and his ad-hoc commando unit took out the hijackers of Flight 93 at the cost of their own lives. And so Mr Bush ended his address by informally deputizing the citizenry: “We have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let’s roll.”

        It’s not as poetic as John McCrae, but then, in the dust of Ground Zero, no poppies blow nor ever will.

        Comment


        • #5
          If we forget those who died that we might live in freedom, and should we fail to raise the torch fallen from their hands, we deserve to be cast into the abyss of oblivion.
          We owe a debt that can only be paid in kind.

          Comment


          • #6
            There's friend of mine who's both a leftie and a greenie. She's 46 and English, and has been a New Zealander for 15 years. At the last dawn service for ANZAC day (our other memorial day for those who have fallen) I had the greatest pleasure in watching her and the people beside her flatten (and I mean on the ground bleeding) three anti-war protesters when they unfurled banners and started chanting shame shame shame as the old soldiers passed by.
            She was shall we say 'conflicted' afterward, as to how she could instinctively suppress others right to protest and also indulge in physical assault. I just smiled and told her she was a New Zealander and it was her duty to protect the mana (dignity) of our kaumatua (old geezers). She seemed pleased by that.
            In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

            Leibniz

            Comment


            • #7
              To the Dead of both sides


              The Box

              The flags are at half mast as they carry the boy home to his family .
              His momma is crying and his Daddy is trying to be brave but he is dieing inside ,
              The Hornor Guard raises ther rifles and the guns fire as they lower the boy into the ground .
              For the boy has come home to day and he will never grow older .
              And mom and dad have died a little bit more today.


              By the old fart
              Just one of my poems in memory to the war dead of all sides .

              Comment


              • #8
                The Cry for the Dead
                By the Old Fart

                We carry the boy home he is covered in the Flag but will anyone care in twenty years no no one will care but his family .
                He is dead and for what . Who can tell me why this young man died today.
                Not I, I say, He died for some cause that will not matter in a hundred years.

                Who crys for the dead of WWI today all there brothers in arms have died and so have there parents .

                The Crys for the dead of WWII will die out in a few years as there brothers die and who rember those brave young men no one will .

                So cry with me for the young men who have died over the years fighting for there people because no one even rembers them this day.


                May we have a moment of pray for these lost boys .
                and raise a glass to all lost comrads

                Comment


                • #9
                  Great post bluesman.

                  The poppy is a really big symbol up hear, whats even more fascinating and makes me proud. Is that Canadians just spontaneously started putting there poppies on the tomb of the unknown soldier when it was unveiled at the War Memorial in Ottawa in 2000. Now all over the country at memorials in small towns and cities alike, people lay there poppies on the memorials.

                  Another thing I learned today, and I hope I can see it one Remembrance day is at the National War Museum in Ottawa, the headstone for the Unknown soldier is positioned on a wall in a room, with a small window positioned so that at exactly 11am on November the 11th the window will cast light onto the headstone.. the headstone is covered in poppies also.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    I went on a trip to France to see the Flanders battlefields a few years ago. We took the Eurotunnel service. The first thing I saw as we came out of the Channel Tunnel on the French side was a poppy.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Not this year , but the years when i was living in Darlington UK , i always went to the cenetaph on the given day the 11th as in the UK it is always celebrated on the Sunday following ? sad to say i and maybe 2 others were the only ones there at the allotted time and day , and people going about their business like nothing was going on

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by tankie View Post
                        Not this year , but the years when i was living in Darlington UK , i always went to the cenetaph on the given day the 11th as in the UK it is always celebrated on the Sunday following ? sad to say i and maybe 2 others were the only ones there at the allotted time and day , and people going about their business like nothing was going on
                        Do I take it you'll continue with your protocol in future when the 11th does not fall on a Sunday Eric?

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