This year for Veteran's Day I'm making oatmeal cookies and pumpkin pie bars for our troops. I'm so grateful for the Cookies for Camouflage campaign being run by EnfieldHooah.org. They will be gathering all the homemade cookies from Enfield residents at the American Legion post and sending them out to troops from Enfield, Ct. to share in time for the holidays.
My Dad was a veteran of two wars and now that he's gone Veteran's Day takes on even more meaning for me. I'm not just doing it for the soldiers that won't be home for Christmas. I'm doing it for Dad....because it may not have been done for him when he needed it. And because every Veteran's Day Dad would go to the local cemeteries and place small flags on all the graves of the fallen soldiers. My Dad was deeply respectful of the veterans and he cried when he put those flags on those graves...remembering his own experiences of war and missing the friends he saw die, never having the chance to grow old surrounded by a loving family like he did.
Dad suffered the rest of his life carrying the horrors of war with him every day. He rarely spoke of any of it as is typical of most veterans that have seen and lived through things that we can never even imagine. He buried it like the rest of them do and struggled for years to keep the ugly truth from his family. The truth that war is not glorious...killing is not something you forget...and innocence is the price you pay to defend your country. You enter the service a fresh faced innocent boy pumped full of patriotic feelings and determination to prove yourself. You come home a man with the horrors of war ingrained in your memory and a gritty resolve to get beyond the nightmarish memories and fit back in to society...if you're lucky enough to come back at all.
I thank God I had my father in my life. He so easily could have been a casualty of war. And if he had, I wouldn't be here today to make these cookies at all.
