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Veterans’ diverse stories

Thursday, November 12, 2009

AMERICA DOES NOVEMBER 11 DIFFERENTLY. Most of the other countries who observe the eleventh day of the eleventh month, harking back to the formal date of the Armistice ending World War I, are honoring their war dead.
 

Not all of this country’s media make the careful distinction, but Veterans Day in the US has been purposely designed, in variance from those other countries, to honor all veterans, those still alive as well as those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

 

Maybe it’s a sign of America’s bias toward celebrating life, in contrast with those mainly Euro-centric participants in the Great War, with their less optimistic philosophic traditions. (Canada, maybe as a closely affected neighbor, is the only nation to share the US approach.)

 

The timing of the Fort Hood massacre has meant its media coverage, starting out horrifically with a Twitter-led avalanche of inaccurate reports, and then a tsunami of wild and baseless opinionating on cable TV, talk-radio and the blogosphere, has of course come to envelop Veterans Day with all its set-piece media events.

 

But true to that endemic life-affirming American outlook, the US military briskly stepped forward with media messaging to reinforce one of the armed forces’ greatest strengths – though one that's grown more slowly than their overwhelming international might in weaponry and manpower.

 

It was “Diversity” that got powerful affirmation from General George Casey, the Army’s Chief of Staff, telling CNN’s and ABC’s weekly flagship political round-ups “it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well … a diverse Army gives us strength” -  repeating that same clarion call on NBC’s Meet the Press. A media-fostered backlash against the small but growing - and of course vital - number of Muslims in the military is the last thing the top brass wants.

 

President Barack Obama, in his role as Eulogist-in-Chief at the memorial service for Fort Hood’s thirteen dead, emphasized even above the “murderous and craven” killings the inspiringly varied character of military personnel today: “man and woman; white, black and brown; of all faiths and all stations - all Americans, serving together to protect our people”.

 

High on that diversity checklist was of course “woman” – reflecting possibly the biggest demographic change in recent years, some of it planned, some of it simply military reaction to facts-on-the-ground. (And in some respects, accommodating women in the ranks, fairly and respectfully, is still far from totally accomplished.)

 

It has certainly taken time to get to the enormous transformation in womens’ military roles that we now see. When Obama spoke, I had just been taking in, as some pre-Veterans Day reading, a remarkable story centering on a female warrior from a previous generation – Westchester County, New York-born Sergeant Myrtle Vacirca (above left).

 

During World War II she was assigned to an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) operation in Italy, doing intelligence work - specifically running safe-houses for US spies - which helped an OSS team, along with Italian partisans, to capture Benito Mussolini as he tried to escape over the Swizz border.

 

Still alive at the age of 93, Sgt Vacirca is now being recommended – belatedly we would all say – for a Bronze Medal citing her "meritorious service and sustained superior performance in the line of duty”.

 

I owe the compelling tale of Vacirca’s valor to another veteran who exemplifies diversity, former US Army captain Luis Carlos Montalván. He’s Cuban-American (one of an estimated 11 percent of military personnel who are Hispanic) and after 17 years’ service, including two tours in Iraq, he’s now a freelance journalist.

 

He's turned out to be a writer of a determinedly activist kind. Busier than many freelancers I know, he’s written voluminously and in tones of vigorous advocacy about veterans’ issues, and notably those concerning female veterans’ (hence the story of a Bronze Star recommendation for Sgt Vacirca).

 

He also demonstrates active concern for the Iraqi people, as a founder-member of the Iraq Veterans’ Refugee Aid Association, which works to help some of the millions of displaced Iraqis, especially those who fled to neighboring Jordan, and which proclaims as its motto “To help, to heal and to honor”.

 

And I haven’t mentioned yet, and he makes little of this himself, that he’s also a disabled veteran - disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder. He lives his busy life with the aid of Tuesday (above right, with Montalván) who’s that increasingly common sight, an ex-soldier’s psychiatric-service dog. These highly trained canines provide reassurance and companionship, and protection among crowds; they monitor the soldier’s medication-taking and even check on their human’s heartbeat.

 

Every veteran, of actual combat or of any kind of military service, will of course have their own, by definition diverse story. Montalván’s is striking.

 

I’m especially glad of it in a week when an Army major, Nidal Malik Hasan, whose duty was to help with others’ psychiatrically damaging frontline experiences, and who is just one of at least 8,000 Muslims in the military, ends up allegedly committing fratricide, possibly under the influence of extreme jihadism. And in a week when a US Army veteran of nine years, a marksman who adopted the name of John Allen Muhammad after leaving the military, is executed for murder after killing ten people by sniper fire, with no apparent design or purpose.

 

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