Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Peace on Veterans Day

Rita Hays
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Today is November 11. When I was a child, we paused in our school classroom at 11am on November 11 to honor the Armistace that had ended World War 1, the War to end all wars. Now we call it (or the Monday nearest it) Veterans Day, and we honor those who have served in our military. If you drive by a VA hospital tomorrow, you will see a line of flags recognizing the day.

What you may not know is that we are probably the only country that has a special hospital system for veterans. And it came about almost by accident. In 1914, the Congress established an insurance program to protect merchant ships against wartime aggression. In 1917, they extended that law to insure those who might be in the military in the war that loomed. One provision of that law was to provide “medical and surgical treatment and prosthetic appliances for all service men and women who were injured or became ill in the line of duty.” Keeping that promise after the war ended was a big order fraught with problems, but eventually a system of hospitals was established and continues to serve our veterans.

What has all this to do with our theme of peace today? Most of our veterans did not sign up with a goal of becoming hospital patients. Until after the Vietnam War, most were draftees. Even now, their motivations to sign up are seldom a belief that force is the best way to solve problems. Many volunteer because of the educational benefits or because they want to escape unpleasant situations. They do not anticipate coming home as basket cases, physical or mental.

My career as a physician has been in the VA. Our patients are wonderful people. Of course, not all of them are wonderful in all ways, but they have in common the knowledge that they have served their country. Whatever they may have done with their lives after they left the military, they are entitled to our best care, and they know it.

When I started in the VA, the war most of them had served in was World War II, a “good war”. Even in retrospect, I can’t see how we could in good conscience have avoided intervening in the suffering brought on millions of innocents by Hitler’s Germany and by the Japanese.

More recently, the morality has been much fuzzier. Should we be the world’s policemen? Is our system so much better than others’ that we should try to impose it on them? Are we really just protecting our own selfish interests? How are we to judge? Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves on this Veterans Day. But our questioning must not take away from the thanks that we owe to those who have done their best, as they saw it, on our behalf.

Sermon: Many Roads to Peace by Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern