November 11th - a day to remember

Some call it by its old name: Armistice Day. Others call it Remembrance Day. Still others know it only as November 11th. No matter what you call it, November 11th is, or should be more than just a date. It's a day to remember those who gave their lives for our countries in a number of wars.

The exact number of wars is debatable. Depends which country you're talking about, and who's counting. But they were all "good wars"... "just wars"... right? They all needed to be fought, right? To preserve freedom and democracy and equality and all those other Good Things. Right? Maybe it's all debatable.

The "Armistice" in Armistice Day refers to the truce proclaimed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 -- the armistice that ended the Great War, the war that would end all wars. But, as "The Ballad of Willie McBride" says, it all happened again... And again... And again.

It all happened before, too. Remembrance Day 2012 is close enough to being the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Queenston Heights, fought on the west side of the Niagara River near the beginning of the War of 1812. One side was fighting for freedom and democracy. The other side was fighting for, errr, freedom and democracy.

Remembrance Day 2012 is also about seven weeks past the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, in which more Americans died than in any other single engagement in any other war... ever. 12,000 Union troops died that day, as did 10,500 Confederate soldiers. They were all fighting for freedom and democracy. They just had different ideas of what those words meant.

The Battle of Antietam preceded by not quite three months the Battle of Fredericksburg, which was just about as bloody. As they surveyed the carnage, General Robert E. Lee said to General James Longstreet, "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."

But it seems we have grown too fond of it. Perhaps it's because advances in technology have reduced the body counts. On "our side", at least. Or maybe it's the advances in medicine and hygiene which means that, nowadays, more soldiers and sailors and airmen die of wounds than of disease and starvation.

Whatever it is, we seem to scarcely finish one war before starting another. Sometimes we don't even wait for the first war to end, so we can fight two or three or four wars all at the same time. All for freedom, democracy, equality, human rights, and generally to make the world a better place. For "our side", at least.

Not all of the thousands upon thousands who died fighting our "good wars" did so for the sake of freedom and all that. Some of them did, sure, but some of them died because they obeyed orders and went unflinchingly to the death to which they were sent. It is those men and women -- the ones who didn't want to be there and shouldn't have been there in the first place -- whom Walt wishes to remember today.

Footnote: If you've never heard "The Ballad of Willie McBride", also known as "No Man's Land" or "The Green Fields of France", click here. This version, by John McDermott, is the best.