That is why all veterans cry.

My dad was the son of a war ‘hero’; a brute of a man who won the Military Medal as a private soldier and the Military Cross as an officer, commissioned in the trenches of the First World War. He was a hard act to follow but my dad did follow him into the army, landing on the Normandy beaches on June 6th, 1944, going on to fight in France and the Netherlands before being shipped out to the Far East. After the Second World War, he tried civilian life, briefly, but re-enlisted, this time in the RAF, where he served, almost to retirement. I grew up as a ‘services’ child’.

After retirement, my dad devoted a great deal of his time to the welfare of fellow servicemen and women, through the British Legion and as a key member of the Normandy Veterans Association (NVA). At the time, he and his comrades did everything they could on the funds they raised themselves with little public support and no government recognition.

My dad told me that the war robbed him of the best years of his life but that some of this time had been restored to him through his work for the NVA and the companionship, especially in his later years, of his old comrades.

Remembrance Day was the most important day of the year for him. It almost always moved him to tears.

I went to the Remembrance Day parade in Blaenavon this year. The size of the turnout surprised me; there were hundreds of people there, of all ages – some representing civic groups but most representing just themselves.

Over recent years, the UK’s military has attracted public support in a way that my father would not have recognised. This increased public support, and generosity, may have arisen as it becomes ever more urgent to make sense of the distant, inexplicable and useless wars into which our service men and women are sent. Maybe it is because people are surviving combat injuries, mental and physical, that a few years ago they might not and they are demanding the support that austerity and indifference might otherwise deny them. In any event, it was moving to see what must have been a significant proportion of the town walking together to the War Memorial on a bitterly cold day in November.

Veterans of my dad’s generation grow fewer but the supply does not seem to end nor does the need to remember what the cost of war really is;

What had started in the coldest sunshine, ended, appropriately, in freezing rain;

My dad’s tears were, of course, his own but Curt Bennett, a former pilot in the Vietnam War, wrote of a visit by veterans to the beaches in Normandy in a way of which I think my dad would have approved.

At the point at which the speaker mounts the podium, to ‘prattle the virtues of war’,

It is at this moment, the old veterans

Eyes mist up, overflow, and tears flow shamelessly

As they at last comprehend all their sacrifice, all their pain,

All their sorrow, all their suffering, all the death,

Did not change or alter a thing, was not a lesson learned

Nor an experience not to be repeated.

Realizing their friend’s painful, brutal, ultimate sacrifice

Was only a necessary evil of Mankind’s political process

Which has never changed, and never will,

For each generation brings anew to the world

Its own self-styled madness of universal death, tragedy and suffering,

In wars to be fought by the young, bright-eyed children of the world

Unknowingly raised as sacrificial lambs of slaughter,

To be killed and gone forever, for nothing.

That is why, all Veterans cry.

 

Lest we forget.

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