There Was Not Always a “Veterans’ Day”

Definition of a Veteran: A Veteran, whether Active Duty, Retired, National Guard or Reserve – is someone who, at one point in his or her life, wrote a check made payable to “The United States of America” for an amount of “up to and including my life”. That is Honor, and there are far too many people in this country who no longer understand it. (Author unknown)



I do not think that Veterans’ Day should be just another “Take The Day Off” holiday.

Veterans’ Day should be a day when all the old men and women who “wrote the check” go down to the local elementary school and sit as honored guests while children, dressed in red, white and blue, step forward and recite appropriate words, and sing the old songs to us. And one of us should then stand up and thank them and tell them a little something about a particular time in our lives that was a defining moment, a time that they will not understand but one that we hope a few of them will remember.

And we should then go and have refreshments in a room where the tables are decorated in bright colors, and the punch and cookies are served by well dressed and handsome young girls and boys who feign an interest in us, our jokes, and our times.

And there should be a parade for us, led by a band or two, maybe including a ROTC marching unit, and with an old restored Army jeep decorated with flags and bunting and, of course, a fire truck out in front of everything. The streets should be lined with people waving Old Glory and cheering as we attempt to walk down Main Street and look solemn, and as we recall the long passed memories of our youth.

November 11 was not always Veterans’ Day.

My father “went to France” in 1917 with the American Expeditionary Force, led by General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. General Pershing was one of his two heroes. The other was Sergeant Alvin York. When our troops arrived on the continent, the French and English generals expected Pershing to turn our fresh young fighters over to them, to be pushed into the horrible, meat grinder battles being fought at Verdun and St. Mihael, battles where thousands of men were killed daily, where trench warfare was the rule, where those two new killing machines, the tank and the machine gun, were put to full use. Stalemate was a commonly used term to describe this kind of war. But General Pershing demanded and got his own sectors, and immediately the American soldiers and Marines began defeating the enemy. Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Woods became our own front and we advanced and won. And the war came to an end. No wonder “Black Jack” was his hero.

My father did not talk much about his time in France. He once described to me the mud that they walked in and slept in and how he considered himself lucky the day he acquired a couple of boards to stretch his blanket on so that he could lie down above the filth and the mire. But that was it, until just before his death.

He was eighty four, an invalid in body but not in mind, and I was driving him around “his” county. Suddenly he said: “Let me tell you about the first Armistice Day”. That was what they called the cessation of combat on the Continent. He described the scene as he and other soldiers rode in a truck from the front toward the port city of Brest. There had been several false alarms, but this time they saw searchlights sweeping the sky and heard the booming of artillery and the screech of sirens as they watched rockets arcing through the heavens. It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and they knew that they would be going home soon. He then came back to Tallahassee with his uniform and a discharge paper, and the State of Florida gave him a $25 bonus.

It took another war for “The War to End all Wars” to be labeled World War I. And it took the end of that war to change the name of Armistice Day to Veterans’ Day, honoring all veterans of all of our wars.

But to Homer Hirt, Sr. it always remained “Armistice Day”, the day he knew he would be coming home.