Some Thoughts on Veterans' Day
An Occasion to Celebrate Heroes Past, Present, and Future...
It seems like it was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, that I was training with my National Guard unit at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, getting ready for deployment to the formerly sovereign nation of Iraq. We were there on Thanksgiving, and a Philadelphia attorney named Eric Spevak and Post 126 of the Jewish War Veterans kindly put together a Thanksgiving Day meal for us in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
At that time, Arthur Seltzer was the commander of Post 126, and he spoke for a few minutes. Seltzer was a World War II veteran who had seen action at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge and who had been present at the liberation of the concentration torture and murder camp at Dachau.
During his speech, and afterwards when I met him and shook his hand, Seltzer praised us for our military service. I was struck at the time by a feeling, which has not diminished since, that I was terribly undeserving of this great man’s praise. It was like I was on a little league team that was practicing for its first game of the season, and we’re being honored at a luncheon where the keynote speaker is this elderly guy named Mickey Mantle, who’s lavishing compliments and encouragement on us as we get ready for, what seems to us like, a big game. And then the speaker happens to mention playing in the World Series and some humorous stories about his old teammates like Yogi Berra, Roger Maris, and Joe DiMaggio; and one of the kids next to me passes me his phone, so I can read the article he pulled up about Mickey Mantle; and I realize the guy I’m listening to is legitimately a legend in the sport where I am an absolute amateur. And he’s praising me? That’s what it felt like.
I wrote Mr. Seltzer a letter afterwards, thanking him and JWV Post 126 for honoring us in this way, which felt wholly undeserved, and for his own service and veritable heroism six decades earlier. I probably sounded like a corny fan-boy, but I meant every word of it. We’ve all heard the saying, frequently applied to Nazi Germany (though it can also be applied closer to home), “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I told Mr. Seltzer that he was “a good man who did something.”
When Seltzer went ashore on D-Day, out of the 36 soldiers on his landing craft, he was one of only two — ONLY TWO OUT OF 36!!! — who survived. In 2022, guys in their late teens and early 20s are still considered “children,” and treated as such. In 1944, boys barely out of high school, or boys who had dropped out of high school to enlist, were charging straight into nonstop torrents of bullets and artillery fire. They stared death in the face and didn’t flinch. They rushed past the fresh corpses of their buddies, knowing that at any moment, they would probably be the next to die. Many were injured, perhaps gruesomely, perhaps even mortally, but they kept fighting until they either they were physically incapable of fighting (because they had been killed or crippled) or the mission was accomplished.
At the time that I heard him speak, Arthur Seltzer had only recently begun talking about his experiences in the War. This was common for a lot of World War II veterans. For the most part, they came back home and tried to forget what they had done and seen, and they just got on, as best they could, with the business of living, getting married, raising children, etc.
I read somewhere that the reason the World War II vets embraced the boring lifestyle of 1950s suburbia, against which their Baby Boomer children revolted, was that they had gotten their fill of excitement in places like Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima; they had seen the barbarity and evil that lies beneath the thin veneer of modern civilization, and they were relieved to get back home and put that thin veneer back up and never take it down again.
My own grandfather fought in the Pacific theater during World War II, and it was something he never talked about until the very end of his life; and even then, it was a little remark here and an intriguing reply there. When my unit was getting ready to fly from Ft. Dix to Kuwait City (en route, eventually, to Baghdad), I talked to him by telephone and mentioned that the flight was about 16 hours (including a refueling stop in Ireland), to which he said, “That’s incredible!” I thought, sure, that’s incredible how long the flight is, right? Nope. He went on to talk about how many weeks they had spent on a transport ship getting from Hawaii to the Western Pacific. I guess it’s all relative, and a 16-hour flight really isn’t so long after all.
As Chris Bray has said so eloquently on his substack Tell Me How This Ends,
. . . we “live in a mansion that someone else bought for [us] — [we] have privileged positions in an affluent society built by the labor and wisdom of previous generations — but [we] increasingly live in piles of garbage . . . [We] were given the culture, but [we] don’t know how to maintain it.”
I don’t know what will become of our culture and country. There’s the G. Michael Hopf quote that’s been making the rounds online lately: “Hard times create strong men; strong men create good times; good times create weak men; and weak men create hard times.” As times get hard, though, I think we will see a rebirth of that greatness of character that was quietly and unassumingly displayed by so many servicemen during World War II. To be sure, there will be evil quislings who will be celebrated as influencers by our degenerate society; but there will also be great men and women who will do real good, even when nobody recognizes or rewards them for it — even, in fact, when they are persecuted for the good that they do — and such stories of courage and virtue will eventually be celebrated.
There is a paradox about Good and Evil: when evil is ascendant, it tends to inspire and reveal real goodness. As C.S. Lewis observed, we live in a dangerous world, where moral issues really do come to the point of life-and-death. Viktor Frankl said that while “Man may be the being that designed the gas ovens at Auschwitz, he is also the being that entered those ovens upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.” A beam from a flashlight may be swallowed up by the noonday Sun, such that it is practically invisible, which is why usually nobody bothers to turn on a flashlight outdoors during daylight; but if that same flashlight is shone on a moonless night, it will appear bright, perhaps even dazzlingly so. During good times, virtue may seem unnoticeable, and easy to take for granted, but during dangerously evil times, even ordinary virtue becomes extraordinary, shining boldly like a lighthouse.
Evil seems in many ways to be ascendant today, but there are presently stories of very real courage and virtue to be told. Recent examples include those, such as Grant Smith, who have taken a stand against the Branch Covidians’ vaccine experimental gene-therapy mandates, which continue to be pushed by evil people:
As we celebrate Veterans’ Day, it is worth noting that we have not reached the “end of history.” Humanity’s book is still being written, and the pen is presently in our hands. We celebrate the lives, heroism, and sacrifices of prior generations, on whose shoulders we stand today. Maybe most of us are spoiled brats and ingrates who fail to appreciate the riches that have been heaped, unearned, upon us. But those heroes of the past were every bit as human as we are today, and their stories can inspire us to face our own challenges as they faced theirs, without flinching or surrendering to the evil that may sometimes seem so overwhelming and ubiquitous. If they could do it in their day, we can do it in ours.
A legendary veteran of foreign wars, millennia ago, wrote a poem for those who feel like they are fighting a losing battle against evil, in which he says, “The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be of upright conversation. Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and their bows shall be broken. The little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked. For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the Lord upholdeth the righteous.” (Psalm 37: 14-17.)
Remember David’s counsel during the coming years. Or the advice of Jesus, Socrates, Boethius, Zoroaster, etc. “There is nothing new under the Sun,” wrote Solomon. Everything that we see, the evil and corruption in high places, slimy and selfish people getting ahead, good people trying to do the right thing but being persecuted and slandered for it, all of it has been done before. The cruel and unjust may prosper in their day, but this world is not the ultimate reality; this life that seems so all-encompassing is something like a dream from which we will someday awake. Some will sell their souls in order to “own” one of the shadows flickering so invitingly on the cave walls. They have their reward. But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the timeless stories and symbols we’ve inherited from ancient sages still point to an eternal reality that can be our North Star, no matter how dark things get.
So happy Veterans’ Day. God bless the souls and legacies of great heroes from our past, like Arthur Seltzer and the 35 other men on his D-Day landing craft, 34 of whom gave their lives that very day on Omaha Beach. They were human, like us, with all the frailties and foibles that our shared humanity entails; but they did noble deeds as praiseworthy as anything celebrated in Homer’s epic poetry.