As part of the British commonwealth we have Remembrance Day to pay our respects to those who fought for our freedom. The wearing of a poppy is to signify the fields of poppies in Flanders where many soldiers are buried.

I read an interesting article about Remembrance Day yesterday.  It was talking about how younger folks are failing to connect to it because they don't know anyone who is being remembered.  It started talking about WWI, but also spoke of WWII.  The sad reality is that there are very few WWII veterans left.  Most are nearly or over 100.  People of my generation hold those who served in WWII in reverence because they were our grandparents.  In thinking about it though, I don't feel the same connection to WWI, because I can't recall any WWI vets I knew (I'm sure there were some, but I was born nearly 60 years after the war ended).  Korea is often referred to as the forgotten war, and Vietnam has a troubled history.  The wars in the Middle East are simple too recent, and also under a cloud.  I hope we don't ever get out of the practice of honoring our vets.  Such men and women sacrificed so we could be free, and that's always something worth remembering.  For me its summed up in one line from America the Beautiful: Oh beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life.  Let's never forget that.  

My dad was in the USAAF during WW2, I was in during Vietnam.  I find it curious that Veterans Day and Memorial Day appear to overlap in scope - I guess Veterans day is supposed to honor those who are alive, Memorial Day those who aren't?

My grandfather served in WW l as a Pharmacist's Mate onboard a destroyer. My dad flew bombers in WW ll and Korea, and my brothers and I served in Vietnam - all of us Navy. Veteran's Day is a special day in our family. 

6sally6 wrote:

Yes it is John.....
"I THINK"... most of the reasons younger generation get confused OR don't know about Veterans Day...Memorial Day...WW1 WWII etc......can be laid at the feet of our SORRY excuse for public education !!
Sure we all know great teachers struggling to do good work..... butt-overalls... the system is in real need of being 'torn down and rebuilt from the ground up'.
To think...when we were in school 60 years ago (pre AI...pre computer...pre-I phone) we still seemed to learn more USEFUL than kids now days
Sez an old man poking around with 2 fangerz on an outdated keyboard !!
Class diiiiismissed.
6sally6

I think that's a broad generalization.  There's FAR, FAR too much history to ever be taught in school.  I know so much of it because I love the subject and have read about it voraciously, took elective classes in it in college, etc.  I didn't learn hardly anything about WWII in school.  The reason I think is that it was barely considered history at the time, because it had just ended 50 years before.  We received an excellent education on American history from colonization through WWI, but we pretty much ran out of time to discuss anything that came later.  I learned about Vietnam and the 1960s from an elective class I took.  In the years since I've learned that our understanding of history is also ever evolving.  A perfect example is that I grew up with the Lost Cause myth surrounding the Civil War.  Modern analysis and scholarly scrutiny has shown exactly how flawed that version of history really was.  

The reason I know so much about WWII is that after I saw Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers I realized that I knew people fairly well who had been through such things.  They never talked about them.  Its not a vet's way, because even the most highly decorated among them don't ever view what they did as heroic.  They lived.  The heroes were the guys that didn't.  After the final episode of Band of Brothers when they are talking to some of the real guys who were still alive at the time, Dick Winters talks about a letter another of the band had sent him where he talks about his granddaughter asking if he had been a hero in the war.  The response was "No, but I served in the company of heroes".  That line will always stick with me, because that was something my grandfather would have said.  It made me immensely sad that by that point he had already been gone for a decade, and I'd never have the ability to talk to him about any of it.  So I did the next best thing; I started reading and learning.  

But that's me.  There are a lot of people who have no real love for history, and that's not a failing of the education system; its ignorance of the value of history.  History provides perspective, and is often predictive.  I understand the modern world much better because I understand the events that shaped it.