Some years ago, I put up the video of a song that speaks to me on Veterans/Remembrance Day, and invited you all to add the one or ones that do the same for you.
When I hear this and the other pieces in this grim playlist, of course), I think of my grandfather, who served from 1914-1918, mostly on the Western Front, mostly as a battery commander in the Royal Horse Artillery. I think of my dad, whose discharge papers my sister just excavated, documenting his four year journey from Japanese language school to Tokyo Bay. I think of my uncle, who fought a towed-gun across northern Europe in 1944 and ’45, and ended his combat service in the Malayan Emergency, which was the only battlefield on which he ever saw a particular opposing soldier aiming a gun personally at him. And of lots more, people I’ve known, and those I’ll never meet.
So here’s that tune again; respond as you will.
Memory is a defense against those for whom war is a prop.
Over to y’all.