Remembrance Day: Lest We Forget

I was hoping I could cut and paste the poem "In Flanders Field" here, but it can be done. You can read the poem here.

As it is, I will write a confession about a past Remembrance Day which haunts me because it shames me. It happened when I was with the 26 Field Regiment in Brandon, Manitoba sometimes in the 1980s.

At the time, I was with the Regiment, I really didn't want to be there. I was there because father put me there and I didn't know what I would have done with myself anyway. I had a vague desire to be more bohemian or something. So my attitude to being in the Militia was a strange one, an immature contempt borne out of my weakness.

This immaturity was on display for all to see when the Regiment went to the Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium for a Remembrance Day ceremony. I mocked the ceremony and the participants throughout. One of my officers saw me and gave me a chiding. But I took it a manner of not someone who deserved a kick-in-the-ass but of a victim with his existential angst added to.

I should have gone home that day but I continued on in the festivities. After the ceremony on Remembrance day, members of the military and veterans will go on to a local legion to drink and reminisce. I told everyone of my chiding and acted the victim. At the legion, there was a band playing old time music. For there were actual war veterans. I even danced along in the music but thinking it square. And irony of ironies, an old woman thanked me for liking the music. Then, I drove around drunk and rear-ended a car on the Brandon's 18th street bridge. The driver I rear-ended didn't stop and I laughed like I was the luckiest man in the world.

Strange now, how I like the music and respect the military. But when I was young, I didn't. The Officer, a Mr. George, I should thank for the chiding. I should apologize to the veterans whose memory I desecrated that day with my behavior.

Shame on me.

Lest We Forget.