Veterans Day 2022: The torch of freedom

Last year, I posted for the second time a recurring Veterans Day article, long a tradition at TOC and Liberty Unyielding 1.0.  In 2022, it appears for the third time.

In the preface for last year (2021), I felt that much had changed since the current article first appeared in 2020.  (An earlier article was published annually from 2009 to 2018.)

Oddly, though, in 2022 my sense is that the sentiments of 2020 are being reaffirmed.  The problem of threats to freedom continues:  more intensely, and in the same patterns.

The creed of American veterans, the yeoman warriors who have taken up arms for our nation’s purposes, has not changed,

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Veterans Day: The torch held high

It has been a tradition at both TOC and the blog Liberty Unyielding, for which I was editor at large from 2012 to October 2021, to post a recurring Veterans Day article.  In 2020, I published the version below for the first time.  It’s interesting to me to reread it now, and realize how much has changed in the last year.  See if you feel the same. – JED

Since 2018, when we passed the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, it has seemed less relevant to commemorate Veterans Day with the annual post we used to use (the last iteration was here).

As we honor military veterans on 11 November, however, I miss an integral element of that old annual post: the John McCrae poem from 1915, “In Flanders Fields.”

Ninety-seven years

The Unknown Soldier from WWI laid out in the Capitol rotunda in 1921.

This post, an annual tradition for Veterans Day at The Optimistic Conservative since 2009, is now an annual tradition at Liberty Unyielding.

Ninety-seven years ago, in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the armistice was proclaimed that ended the terrible fighting in World War I.  A war that had erupted in large part because Europe’s political leaders, a century on from the Napoleonic conflicts, were accustomed to war remaining limited, produced some of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The six-month battle of the Somme in 1916 took the lives of an unimaginable 1.5 million French, German, and British soldiers – without either side achieving sustainable penetration of the line of confrontation, or any operational victory. WWI was the most tactically and politically frustrating of wars, admitting little maneuver, little jockeying for advantage, and no enduring significance to victory.

Ninety-six years

Armistice Day, 11 November, 1918, on Wall Street. (Image: Wikipedia)

This post, an annual tradition for Veterans Day at The Optimistic Conservative since 2009, is now an annual tradition at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

Ninety-five years

Interment of the Unknown Soldier, 11 November 1921

This post is an annual tradition for Veterans Day at The Optimistic Conservative.

This year, I am putting up the Veterans Day post on the anniversary of USS Olympia’s arrival in Washington Navy Yard, on 9 November 1921, bearing the body of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.