Today is Veteran's Day in the United States. To those who have served, to those who serve now, and those who will serve- thank you for your courage, selflessness, and dedication.
Maybe one day we won't need more warriors. That day will be awesome- but we'll always owe our gratitude to those who served.
Originally called Armistice Day (as it is in New Zealand, France, Belgium, and Serbia), the day was initially established as a holiday in the United States to commemorate the end of hostilities in World War I on the "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," the day was renamed Veterans Day in 1954 with the passing of a Congressional bill that established the day as a national holiday here. As noted above, the day isn't just commemorated here in the US. It's known as Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations- including Australia and Canada.
President Woodrow Wilson issued a message to the nation in 1919, expressing what he felt the day meant to Americans:
"A year ago today our enemies laid down their arms in accordance with an armistice which rendered them impotent to renew hostilities, and gave to the world an assured opportunity to reconstruct its shattered order and to work out in peace a new and juster set of inter national relations. The soldiers and people of the European Allies had fought and endured for more than four years to uphold the barrier of civilization against the aggressions of armed force. We ourselves had been in the conflict something more than a year and a half. - With splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns, we remodeled our industries, concentrated our financial resources, increased our agricultural output, and assembled a great army, so that at the last our power was a decisive factor in the victory. We were able to bring the vast resources, material and moral, of a great and free people to the assistance of our associates in Europe who had suffered and sacrificed without limit in the cause for which we fought. Out of this victory there arose new possibilities of political freedom and economic concert.
The war showed us the strength of great nations acting together for high purposes, and the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men. To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with - solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service, and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of nations."
