Veterans Day, once known as Armistice Day, was established to commemorate the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918. It was not, despite the optimism of the time, the “war to end all wars,” and the day came to be renamed to more properly honor all those Americans summoned to serve around the world in the act of war and the cause of peace.
Those are the facts of this day, and here are more: Beginning with our own revolution, more than 40 million American men and women have been called to conflict; for an estimated 1,157,890, it ended on a battlefield, on our own or distant soil.
Tens of millions more have served, and serve today, in a way no less noble or brave or without peril-to stand as sentinels at the gates of freedom. It is for all of them, the dead and living, that we have this day.
And yet this day is among the least celebrated of our holidays, perhaps because we no longer perceive great causes in our missions, perhaps because we do not differentiate war on countries, which as a people we regret or deplore, from duty to country.
Throughout our history, these millions have gone to duty, many willingly and many not, many to wage war, many to prevent it. For all of them, in blood or separation from home and family, there is sacrifice. For all the armed forces, the commonality is service to country that we may be secure. For all the rest of us, however we judge the missions, our duty is to appreciate the men and women who stand ready.
In its ultimate, never has the meaning of this day been expressed more poignantly or exquisitely than at another battlefield, at Gettysburg, in 1863. It is this that we should recall this Veterans Day, “. . . that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”
