This, to me, is still the most moving piece of audio ever recorded. What amazes me is that the guns fall completely silent at the exact moment they were supposed to fall silent, and the image in my head is that of the poor bastards in the trenches laying down their arms and walking away, like millworkers at the end of a long and grueling shift.
As I made the turn onto the back nine of my life, it occurred to me that not only were we losing the veterans of that second, more terrible war, but that we were now starting to lose the children that they raised. Many of them, I've found, didn't talk much about the war, and the ones that did talked oddball things that had happened, raucous shore leaves, and moments of peace.
I remain adamant that we should go back to calling 11/11 Armistice Day and find another date for Veterans Day. Maybe April 12 to celebrate the victory over treason at Appomattox.
This was the first two years of my father's WWII: Naval Armed Guard gunnery officer on Liberty ships in the North Atlantic while dodging the U Boats. Then he got transferred to a destroyer and shot at Pacific islands while ducking Japanese suicide planes.
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