Tag: Veterans Day

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Thank You For Your Service

You are being discharged from the Army today — from your Army. It is your Army because your skill, patriotism, labor, courage, and devotion have been some of the factors which make it great. You have been a member of the finest military team in history. You have accomplished miracles and battle and supply. Your country is proud of you and you have every right to be proud of yourselves.

You have seen, in the lands where you worked and fought and where many of your comrades died, what happens when the people of a nation lose interest in their government. You have seen what happens when they follow false leaders. You have seen what happens when a nation accepts hate and intolerance …


That’s the beginning of a letter written in 1945 by General Jonathan Wainwright, a Medal of Honor winner and survivor of the Bataan Death March during World War II. He was also present on the USS Missouri when Japan signed the letter of surrender. Wainwright sent the letter to the soldiers he commanded as they were being discharged at the end of the war. It was circulating on social media — as everything must, these days — on Monday, Veterans Day.

At 6:30 Tuesday morning, I watched out my kitchen window as my stepson headed Downtown to his job. He was bundled up like a Siberian. That’s because he works in homeless outreach, driving a golf cart around, dispensing coffee, checking on the needs of folks living on the street. It was 19 degrees, windy, and snowing. I suspect Roman handed out some coffee to a shivering veteran or two.

We are all determined that what happened in Europe and in Asia must not happen to our country. Back in civilian life you will find that your generation will be called upon to guide our country’s destiny. Opportunity for leadership is yours. The responsibility is yours. The nation which depended on your courage and stamina to protect it from its enemies now expects you as individuals to claim your right to leadership, a right which you earned honorably and which is well deserved …

On Monday, a few-dozen veterans gathered to celebrate the holiday in a nondescript building called “the Bunker” in Tijuana, Mexico. They were former U.S. servicemen, including some combat veterans, who had been deported from the United States after their service to this country. Most of them were separated from their families, hoping to return to the U.S. after their mostly ignored applications for re-entry are resolved.

Choose your leaders wisely — that is the way to keep ours the country for which you fought. Make sure that those leaders are determined to maintain peace throughout the world. You know what war is. You know that we must not have another. As individuals you can prevent it if you give to the task which lies ahead the same spirit which you displayed in uniform …

On Monday, many people I know posted pictures of their fathers, husbands, wives, and other family members who had served this country in uniform. And that’s a good thing, honoring those who’ve put their lives on the line to help preserve this fragile, troubled democracy.

On Monday, our national leaders gave the usual speeches filled with hoary cliches about honoring those who served. But all too often there are exclusions, based on politics, self-interest, and self-aggrandizement. We need to honor all our veterans, including POWs who “were captured,” veterans who testify under oath before Congress, veterans who are immigrants, veterans of all faiths, veterans who were wrongly deported, veterans living in an alley in Downtown Memphis.

Start being a leader as soon as you put on your civilian clothes. If you see intolerance and hate, speak out against them. Make your individual voices heard, not for selfish things, but for honor and decency among men, for the rights of all people.

Accept that trust and challenge which it carries. I know that the people of America are counting on you. I know that you will not let them down. Goodbye to each and every one of you and to each and every one of you, good luck!

Nearly 75 years later, General Wainwright’s words still ring true. They are well worth remembering the next time you hear someone say “thank you for your service.” The country could certainly use some of that “honor and decency among men” he mentioned. And some of that good luck.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Our Veterans — and Us

This being a post-election week in which some politicians are exulting in victory and others are, in a strictly figurative sense, licking their wounds, it might prove useful to remember that there are numerous of our fellow

citizens out there for whom words signifying the high side and low side of combat are not metaphors at all but tokens of literal life-and-death situations they encountered in the service of their country.

These are our veterans, who were honored this week in a national holiday named for them — the living and the dead and those, for that matter, whose service in uniform is continuing and who stand ready to answer the next call to arms or national emergencies of other kinds.

Even as we took this brief time-out to commemorate our brothers and sisters who have performed such service, we were mindful of perils that belong not merely to the mystic chords of memory that Lincoln spoke of but to the present, to what we are used to calling “real time.”

We are aware that a war we once considered over, the one in Iraq, is anything but, and that President Obama has begun the kind of gradual reassignment of military personnel there, and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East, that a recent generation grew unhappily familiar with in the case of Vietnam. “Mission creep” is the term of art for what may be about to happen. There is even a sense in which a potential long-term struggle against the new specter called ISIS resembles the former one against an enemy that went by the name of Viet Cong. That one also started out as a cautious commitment of military “advisers” and air support.

We are not attempting here to judge the pros and cons of such a commitment, although it is surely the patriotic duty of our newly elected representatives in Congress to make just such an effort, as it is incumbent on them and on the president to be ever mindful of opportunities for peace and for the resolution of the world’s intractable animosities.

It is all the more necessary to exercise careful judgment at the highest councils of government because the grunts who do the dirty work at the risk of their lives are duty-bound by the requirements of their oath of service to do what they are called upon to do.

Really, we can’t say it any better than Abraham Lincoln did: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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Calling the Bluff Music

AOVS Provides Support, Resources To Memphis Vets

Jerome Hardaway (L) with Cordell Walker (executive director of AOVS)

  • Jerome Hardaway (L) with Cordell Walker (executive director of AOVS)

For nearly a century, November 11th has been recognized nationwide as the day to honor those who have served in the military to preserve our country’s freedom.

However, for some, Veterans Day is also a solemn reminder that many of these same individuals who invested their time and sacrificed their lives for the United States are plagued with the hardship of being homeless, suffering from substance abuse, mental illnesses, unemployment, and other challenges.

Veterans make up only seven percent of the nation’s population but nearly 13 percent of the homeless adult population, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

In Memphis, 30 percent of all homeless people are veterans, according to Alpha Omega Veteran Services (AOVS). Since 1987, AOVS has provided resources, housing, and services to 8,000 veterans.

“We try to get every single one of [the city’s homeless veterans] some form of housing, and we try to get them the tools they need to get back in society,” said combat veteran and AOVS member Jerome Hardaway. “We help guys with [post-traumatic stress disorder] and physical disabilities.”

AOVS provides readjustment counseling to veterans so they can socially re-integrate back into society. This involves helping veterans learn how to cope with negative events of their military history, overcome their battle with substance abuse, and obtain employment or housing.

The veterans that AOVS services range from those who participated in World War 2 to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Hardaway said the only requirement to receive assistance from AOVS is to be a veteran that didn’t have a dishonorable discharge.

“We cover the whole stake, from the 1940s to now. We don’t ignore anybody,” Hardaway said. “We don’t turn anyone away, because they’re not a combat vet or from a particular era of war. Everybody gets help. The youngest veteran learning the tools to cope with PTSD is 23 years old, having served two tours in Afghanistan. The oldest veteran is 81, suffering mental and physical disabilities due to the Vietnam War.”

Hardaway is an Afghanistan and Iraq veteran. He served six years as a Phoenix raven, which is a component of the U.S. Air Force Security Forces.

He said AOVS assists more than 120 veterans (75 to 90 of them are combat veterans) a year and boasts a 98 percent success rate. Hardaway said it’s disheartening to know that there are so many veterans suffering from homelessness, substance abuse, and other burdens in Memphis and across the country.

“You don’t come back home the same as you left just due to the fact that you’re dealing with the ideology from going from just a normal person to having taken lives,” Hardaway said. “And then you’re trying to cope with that. It’s not as easy as it seems on a video game. You can’t just press reset. It’s life-changing. And one of the things that pushes me is that it’s hard watching someone having to learn how to deal with that.”

The organization’s primary headquarters is located at 1183 Madison Ave. For more information on AOVS, how to donate to the organization, or volunteer for it, visit www.aovs.org

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