Veteran’s Day 2017
by J. Allen Wilson — Read all 1,629 poems by J. Allen Wilson
The closing hours of Veteran’s Day 2017 brought me into a somber moment of remembrance. Jan had sent me to the grocery store to pick up a few items. There were very few people in the store at that time of evening, only the man in front of me and a lady in the next aisle over.
As the young lady cashier was ringing up my groceries, the cashier from the other aisle walked over and whispered something in my cashiers ear and handed her a $20.00. I thought nothing of it until she finished my transaction and she handed me the money and said the lady in the other aisle wanted to thank me for my service. I looked over at her to say thank you but that was not necessary but she just quietly and with a sad look on her face shook it off as if to say ‘No - I want you to have it‘.
This kind of kindness touched me deeply and tears formed in the corners of my eyes and I began to weep. I didn’t however weep for me, I wept for others. I wept for those who gave it their all…those who did not make it home.
Then my cashier and the other one who had by then walked over toward me, both solemnly wept with me.
Saturday, November 11, 2017
Veteran’s Day 2017
They called your name,
There was a job that had to be done.
You answered that call to duty.
There was a war that had to be won.
You shied not at what was before you, not far ahead.
You fought in the jungles and mountains and deserts ducking enemy fire and crawling like a snake on the ground, often past your friends who were already dead.
You would go hours without sleep,
You would pray to God.
Then an hour later would question His existence as you lay bleeding, surrounded by others body parts lying in the muddy, bloody sod.
And if you per chance fought in that war over 4 decades ago,
If you survived, you came home to calls of hate,
You were cursed and scorned because you answered the call of duty and even today you carry that time still in your head.
That my friends is why in this store tonight I did weep.
I wept for those who did not make it home, those who now rest in the peace of eternal sleep.
And I wept also for those of us who did come home and now 4 decades later finally getting a thank you for your service.
J. Allen Wilson ©
11/11/2017
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While I hated the war and admired those that would go so far as to be conscientious objectors or to go as far as leaving the country from an unfair lottery system that largely took average Joes right out of high school and made them "believe they were winners" until they got there and realized what kind of hell they were really in.
I never yelled at or taunted anyone who was a veteran of that awful miscarriage of patriotism. But I have talked to many veterans because they see me paralyzed and think that I was there, allowing us to share what we both experienced.
Ron