Returning troops deserve hurrahs
With Veterans Day upon us again, Johnny and GI Jane are trickling home, rather than marching in parades to well-deserved hurrahs.
Some, like Boise teacher Luke Miller, have earned their way into the pantheon of American war heroes and special medals for their bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Miller, a 25-year-old Marine reservist, received the prestigious Military Vanguard Award on Thursday in a Washington, D.C., ceremony for rescuing three Idaho Marines badly wounded by a roadside bomb May 8, according to the Idaho Statesman.
Others, like Marine Cpl. William Wegner, a Washington State University political science major, have a new appreciation for Veterans Day after risking their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan and, in Wegner’s case, as described by the WSU Daily Evergreen, participating in the awful but sacred duty of handling the bodies of fallen comrades.
Still others are coming home to little fanfare but the tears and hugs of family and friends.
Almost all deserve the appreciation of a fractured nation – and much more.
Mayor Clay Larkin and Post Falls residents are showing us creative ways to honor the service of the current generation of military veterans.
Larkin has been working with the National Guard to arrange a special flight to bring back most of North Idaho’s citizen soldiers together, so they can be welcomed with the same pageantry they received as they left for a year of deployment in dangerous Iraq – an official welcome at the Spokane International Airport, an escort to the local armory, with residents and emergency personnel waving from freeway overpasses. Larkin’s inspiration for the special welcome has roots in another time: “We don’t want to see it become another Vietnam,” he told The Spokesman-Review.
North Idaho’s National Guardsmen will be met by 300 giant wooden ribbons along the roads leading to the armory, with messages “Coming Home Soon” and “Support Our Troops,” prepared last month by military mother Joannie Burnett and others. Each of the 110 soldiers will be presented with a commemorative hunting knife from Buck Knives, one of the newest Post Falls corporations. Also, plans are under way to give each of the soldiers Welcome Home boxes filled with gift certificates, coupons and other items, and to stage a sit-down dinner for the guardsmen and their families in December of January.
In the years ahead, U.S. involvement in the two Middle Eastern wars of the 21st millennium will become a footnote in history books as our country begins to forget about their cost in dollars, blood and tears. The first Iraq war already is a hazy memory. Vietnam remains a rallying cry for peace advocates but little more. Korea lives on in “M*A*S*H” reruns and the dwindling band of American citizens who fought there. World War II happened so long ago that Pearl Harbor Day sometimes passes without notice by younger generations.
Nothing can stop the memories of harrowing times from fading with the generations that lived through them. But it is our duty to honor the service of those returning from war while those memories are fresh.