My Southwest Airlines \u201cA\u201d boarding pass on flight #427 from Baltimore to Albany lost its advantage last week, as I was bumped to the back of the line for patriotic reasons. But I didn\u2019t mind.<\/p>\n

On this designated \u201cHonor Flight,\u201d about 60 military veterans, mostly in their 80s and 90s, were returning from a trip to Washington DC, where they visited the memorials that commemorate the wars they fought in. One of the privileges accorded Honor Flight veterans is to pre-board ahead of everyone else.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m cool with honoring these guys by promoting them to the front of the line:\u00a0 They reminded me of my late father, who landed on Utah Beach on the third day of the invasion of Europe in 1944. Like others of his time, he told us almost nothing about his experiences. Former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw chronicled these veterans in his best seller, whose name, \u201cThe Greatest Generation,\u201d has become the meme for describing World War II-era soldiers.<\/p>\n

Seeing that contingent of veterans wearing their \u201cHonor Flight\u201d t-shirts sparked in me a wave of sentimentality and choked-up emotion that I didn\u2019t realize I still had. My father perfectly embodied an apt description of these veterans that\u00a0I happened to bookmark while reading\u2014in airports and during flights\u2014Ian McEwans\u2019 decidedly non-military novel, Solar<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike many men of his generation, he did not speak about his experiences and relished the ordinariness of postwar life, its tranquil routines, its tidiness and rising material well-being, and above all its lack of danger\u2014everything that was to appear stifling to those born in the first year of the peace.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I imagined the Honor Flight veterans as young men, photographed during basic training in their crisp, Army-green uniforms, as my father was, before the reality of war overtook them. I wondered how many of them saw soldiers drown as they stepped off their landing craft, when crews stopped short of the landing zone and disgorged troops into too-deep water\u2014one of the stories doled out by my mother many years later. And I,wondered if others had found themselves separated from their units, left to fend for themselves by shooting and eating animals that happened into their gunsights, as my father had been, in the cold, Luxembourg winter of the Battle of the Bulge. My father spoke of this incident only because we asked him about the mounted deer’s head that hung above the door in the den of the house he built for us in 1947.<\/p>\n

Most of the Honor Flight veterans I saw probably didn\u2019t experience the anti-Semitism heaped upon my father\u2014but only spoken of obliquely by my mother. And most were probably younger during the war. My father volunteered for the Army at age 32, with a one-year-old baby at home–ostensibly, according to our family\u2019s war lore–to protect his younger, less resilient brother from the harsh realities of Army life and battle. As it was with all of his war experiences, we learned of this act of fraternal heroism only many years later\u2014and the news did not come from Dad.<\/p>\n

So, I didn\u2019t mind the few minutes’ extra wait to board Flight #427. And I didn\u2019t feel quite so much of my customary discomfort with and cynicism about \u201cpatriotism\u201d when the procession of Honor Flight vets\u2014many in wheelchairs\u2014received a round of applause from other travelers as they made their way to Gate A12. And if a trip to Washington, DC\u2014all expenses paid by the Honor Flight non-profit group\u2014gave them and their families a sense of closure and recognition, who am I to scoff?<\/p>\n

I asked one veteran, who was sitting near me awaiting the call to board the plane, where he had served. “Korea,” he said. “And a few years ago, the Korean government gave some of us an all-expense-paid trip to Korea, as a way of thanking us for helping them fend off the North Koreans 60 years ago.”<\/p>\n

That remark made me wonder about something. Will America give the same respect and charity to veterans of the Viet Nam War as they age into their 70s and 80s? \u00a0They were almost all draftees\u2014young men sent into a meat grinder on an unwinnable mission that America turned against. No ticker-tape parades for them\u2014mostly,\u00a0 they came home feeling burned out, used, shamed, horrified, and unacknowledged.\u00a0 Do veterans of an unpopular war deserve Honor Flights, too?<\/p>\n

Logic and cynicism tell me that veterans of the Iraq wars will get more respect.\u00a0 Iraq War I was viewed as a \u201cgood\u201d war [against Saddam Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait], and because the western coalition \u201cwon.\u201d\u00a0 Veterans of George W. Bush\u2019s Iraq War II may rank lower on the\u00a0 honor spectrum, because that conflict was more controversial [not to mention\u00a0wholly unjustified] and poorly executed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid that our collective American consciousness feels better about drawing attention to veterans of \u201cgood\u201d \u00a0and \u201csuccessful\u201d wars than about honoring the soldiers [or should I say victims] of wars waged under dubious circumstances. We\u2019d prefer to forget about those.<\/p>\n

So, I have to wonder: In fifty years, who\u2014if anyone\u2014will pay for Honor Flights or all-expense-paid visits back to the battlefield for veterans of the war in Afghanistan?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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