Not Just Another Day

For many, Veterans Day is the official start of the holiday season, a gateway to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day when we start thinking about parties, potlucks, and presents. Veterans Day is also a gateway holiday to the second half of the college football season, signaling the coming of great rivalry games. It’s easy to forget that Veterans Day started as Armistice Day to mark the end of World War I, the war that cost Europe a generation of its youth. The Greatest Generation was born in those years, and the Great Depression and World War II were still in the future. World War I was very real for my grandmother, who used this noisemaker to mark the Armistice. She wrote on the now weathered and brittle card, “This and everything that could be used to make a noise was used to celebrate the Armistice, Nov 11, 1918.”

Amidst all the holiday hoopla, it’s easy to forget that President Eisenhower signed the bill turning Armistice Day into Veterans Day to recognize the guarantors of our freedoms across all wars. However, the reminders are all around us. They are the 90-year-olds making their last Honor Flights and the 20-somethings you’re interviewing for that job opening in your company. They are the women elected to office and the men starting their own businesses. They are the amputees learning how to walk on prosthetics and the individuals relying on the calming presence of service dogs.

There will be ceremonies and speeches to mark Veterans Day, televised concerts from Washington, DC, and old war movies running on the television networks. You’ll probably thank veterans you know for their service, but how else can we thank our veterans? If you exercised your right to vote, you thanked a veteran. If you voiced your opinion in a town hall meeting, you thanked a veteran. If you went to church on Sunday, you thanked a veteran.

You thanked a veteran because you exercised your freedoms without fear. So get out there, and enjoy the holiday season. Scream loudly for your team, and eat lots of holiday food. Relish what veterans purchased with their service because they did it for you.

Article by Leroy Hurt, Associate Dean, Professional Development and Community Engagement, The University of Alabama, retired U.S. Army officer.

Leroy Hurt, Associate Dean, Bama At Work

How Do We Say Thank You? Memorial Day 2014

How do we say thank you?

I recall Memorial Day, 1995, at the Flanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium. A Belgian schoolgirl recited these lines: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row,” lines that reminded us of what was sacrificed: “We are the Dead. Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / Loved and were loved, and now we lie /In Flanders fields.” Belgian school children sang the United States’ national anthem and laid poppies at each of the 368 graves of U.S. soldiers who fell in World War I. The Belgian organizers placed wreaths at the memorial, punctuating the fact that we Americans were guests at that ceremony. You see, the Belgians, like other Europeans, organized and ran these Memorial Day ceremonies to express their gratitude for our nation’s sacrifices in two world wars to liberate their lands. How then can we show gratitude to the fallen and their survivors?

• President Franklin Roosevelt tried in a letter to Thomas and Alleta Sullivan, whose five sons served and died together on the USS Juneau in World War II, saying, “I offer you the condolences and gratitude of our country. We who remain to carry on the fight must maintain spirit, in the knowledge that such sacrifice was not in vain.”
• Our entertainers try. The character in Saving Private Ryan played by Tom Hanks charged Matt Damon’s character to “Earn it.” The characters of the TV series 7th Heaven did good deeds in a fallen soldier’s memory. Of course, Bob Hope spent his Christmases entertaining our forces around the world.

Over the years, however, I’ve come to learn the greatest expression of gratitude for so great a gift isn’t repayment. It’s demonstrating a changed life that comes from accepting the gift, using the gift, and passing it on.

• By accepting the gift, we honor its purpose. Those who died in battle joined the military for different reasons but readily accepted the ideals of duty, honor, and country. We too can accept those ideals as our own. West Point’s Cadet Prayer says it well, “Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life. Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”
• After accepting the gift, we use it by fulfilling its purpose. We can fulfill that purpose by engaging and serving our communities and our country; that is, we citizens can bloom where we’re planted.
• We pass the gift on by sharing its purpose. We can model those ideals at home, at work, at school, and around the community because the words we speak and the things we do will, on other days and in other places, bear fruit in the lives of others.

Let’s therefore honor the fallen for what they have given us – a life of freedom, a country where we can exercise it, and lessons we can apply to our lives – to prove ourselves worthy of those gifts, purchased at a price we remember on Memorial Day.

On this Memorial Day, Bama At Work remembers those who paid the price for our freedom and honors those who have served and those who serve today.

Article by Leroy Hurt, Associate Dean, Professional Development and Community Engagement, The University of Alabama, retired U.S. Army officer.