November Column Winner

Veterans Day

By Brian Blansett, The Lincoln County News

When I got out of the service in 1976, there wasn’t a lot of fanfare made about veterans.

I came home after five years, enrolled in college a week after my discharge, bought a pickup with money I’d saved and let the GI Bill cover most of my college expenses.

I was happy with that and was satisfied I had done my part.

No one was ever mean to me or my veteran friends for having served, but there weren’t the public displays of patriotism that we see today. Schools didn’t have veterans assemblies, churches didn’t have programs for veterans and there certainly were no parades.

There was a lot of cynicism back then, following the Vietnam War, Watergate, the racial struggles in the South and the Jimmy Carter presidency.

I suppose the public needed time to step back, take some deep breaths and try to get a new reading off the collective moral compass.

Things changed about the time of the first Gulf War. I remember sitting in church one Sunday near the Fourth of July when the pastor asked everyone who had served in the military to please stand.

There were eight or 10 of us who stood, nervously glancing at each other and then relaxing when the pastor thanked us for our service and the congregation applauded.

That was the first time in the 15 years since my discharge that I had encountered such an event. 

Nowadays they are common, but that wasn’t the case 40 or 50 years ago.

I’ve covered a lot of Veterans Day activities since then and always enjoyed them, but had never gone to one except as a news guy.

Maybe it’s the Imposter Syndrome. I was a supply sergeant and have been shot at more covering news stories than I was in the military.

I always felt kind of bogus compared to my cousin Bill, who did two tours as a forward observer in Vietnam and died from exposure to Agent Orange. Or my cousin Ron, who was severely burned in the explosion when the truck he was riding ran over a land mine in Vietnam.

But last week my granddaughter, Ruby, had a speaking part in the Veterans Day program at her school in Choctaw and invited me to come.

It felt odd, being there without a camera or notepad, but I enjoyed it and enjoyed going to her second-grade class afterward and being introduced. And I especially enjoyed having cookies and punch with her afterward.

It was not nearly as awkward as that church service all those years ago. And I think I might go again next year.