How Best to Honor Our Veterans

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, the guns went quiet. November 11 began as silence, not spectacle—but with ears still ringing from years of constant barrages. What we first called Armistice Day became Veterans Day a generation later, widening the circle from one war to all who wore the uniform. We’ve tinkered with the calendar, but meaning lives in the day itself. In 1954, Congress formally renamed Armistice Day to Veterans Day; in 1978 the holiday returned to November 11 after a brief Monday move. 

That origin matters. Veterans Day isn’t a scoreboard for policy wins and losses. It’s a promise to the people who carry policy’s consequences. It says to veterans and their families: we know what we asked; we see what it cost; we’ll keep faith when the cameras are gone.

Few veterans have helped us feel that cost more clearly than Wilfred Owen. A British infantry officer killed a week before the armistice, he wrote in the wet cold—wire snagging wool, mud swallowing boots, thunder that never rolled away. His poems don’t condescend. They witness. He named the earthwork claustrophobia, the tenderness among men with nothing left but each other, the ache of dawn and birdsong beside ruin. His aim, he said, was “the pity of war.” That phrase still instructs.

Here’s the bridge from 1918 to now: the particulars change; the core of service doesn’t. Trench mud became desert sand and heat. Written letters became emails. Loneliness and longing for home remain. And the feelings abide—duty braided with doubt; pride shot through with grief; gallows humor beside stubborn love. A century on, those truths haven’t expired.

I learned a version of them as a young infantry officer in the 2003 push toward Baghdad. In the aftermath of our Euphrates crossing in 2003—on a day a lifeless body stamped itself into my memory—I wrote a short poem capturing the feeling I had in that moment: “There must be peace in death as the body lies still. The man has taken his last breath. His remains begin to chill. No more battles will be fought, yet I have many more. Though I wish to stop, I cannot…” The vision etched on my spirit as I realized that the burden of victory meant more combat, more trauma, more weariness. 

Nearly a hundred years before I penned my piece, Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est. He vividly described the moments preceding and following a gas attack which consumed one of his fellow soldiers: “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” Owen concludes: “The old lie: Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro patria mori.” In translation, the old lie: It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Owen wasn’t scorning service; he was puncturing propaganda so the public could see the cost—and keep faith with those who bore it.

That’s the hard edge Owen made visible and veterans in every era carry: the fight doesn’t end just because the war did. Many of us move forward—raise families, some start companies, coach teams—but echoes still arrive on their own schedule. It’s on leaders and neighbors alike to make that sacrifice mean something.

One gift of Veterans Day is that it gives the rest of the country a language for those echoes. Reading Owen helps—even across flag and ocean—because his lines let civilians hear something they haven’t lived and let veterans say what they’ve carried without shrinking it to a slogan. Reading the Americans who followed—poets, novelists, memoirists, reporters from our post-9/11 wars—does the same. The point isn’t to sanctify war or scold the public. It’s to practice attention. Faith-keeping starts there.

What does keeping faith look like when the parade is over? It isn’t complicated, but it is demanding. Timely, competent care—mental and physical—without waitlists that quietly tell people to tough it out. It looks like employers who hire for potential as much as pedigree—and managers who know how to listen. It looks like neighbors who wave. It looks like coaches who make room on the field. It looks like libraries, houses of worship, and civic groups that welcome veterans not as mascots but as members.

And it looks like engaging the literature—old and new. Not because every book will be yours to love, but because each honest account enlarges the country’s memory. A republic is healthier when its stories are plural and precise.

As for me, I’ve tried to add a few pages. Downriver blends narrative and verse to trace a path from the invasion of Iraq through a brief career at Lehman Brothers before its collapse along with my own and, finally, toward the slow, unromantic work of healing. But this day isn’t about one book or one battle. It’s about the people who served, the society they return to, and the public officials who decide whether promises will be kept.

Armistice Day began as a silence—an agreement to stop firing. A century on, Veterans Day can be a different kind of silence: the pause before we answer the holiday’s question. What do we owe the people who stood the watch? Gratitude, yes. But gratitude without understanding is shallow, and understanding without action is unfinished. The country I believe in does both. It looks veterans in the eye, listens long enough to be changed, and then does the ordinary, concrete things that make lives better.

One gift of the day is a common language that echoes that arrive on their own schedule. Read Owen, and the Americans who followed—not to glorify war, but to hear without euphemism. Each honest piece of writing enlarges the country’s memory.

On November 11, we honor those who never returned and those who did, carrying weight no one can see. This Veteran’s Day, look veterans in the eye, listen long enough to be changed—and then do one ordinary, concrete thing that makes a life better. That is how a Republic keeps faith.