Today is the day we honor those who have served our country in the military.
In spite of how some people interpret it, Veterans Day is not a holiday when we celebrate those who died in service. That’s what we celebrate on Memorial Day at the end of May. No, today is the day we honor those — some volunteers, some draftees — who stepped out of their own lives and did what they could to serve the public good.
There aren’t many people under the age of 65 who have served involuntarily. None of my three closest friends served, although two of them grew uo in military families.
I came of age at the tail end of the draft years, and I did not serve.
I wish I had. In fact, I wish we had managed to salvage some form of mandatory national service as a national policy.
The fact is, there are few things ever to do more for the democratization of American life than mandatory military service in World Wars I and II. My grandfather was from a working-class Ohio family, and he formed a lifelong friendship with the man who owned the Chicago Tribune.
Hillbillies found themselves in the same units with the sons of millionaires, and in some cases, they formed relationships that lasted past their days in the service. Some of them even came to realize they weren’t as different from each other as they had previously thought.
Of course there were always the people who couldn’t care less about the common good. When visiting France in 2018 for the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, then=President Trump called the 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood “suckers” and said he didn’t understand why the U.S. had been in WWI at all.
Then he asked, “Who were the good guys in this war?”
Let’s leave Trump out of it, though. Let’s recognize that while there may be exceptions, on the whole it would be a wonderful thing for this country to have two mandatory years of national service after high school.
Not necessarily military service, although that will certainly be a large party of it. There are so many other areas of life adaptable to public service in need of help. Literacy programs, public health clinics, cleaning up dilapidated areas. These are all areas that can use help, and they would provide experiences that would help those helping out to understand our country better.
There are certainly other countries that require two years of national service for young adults.
If we did it, no one would be able to call those who chose that route “suckers” or “losers.”
We could just call them Americans.