Veteran’s Day is celebrated annually on Nov. 11 to honor those who served in the U.S. military. But what does this day mean to veterans themselves?
At St. Thomas, a joint event between the Karon Veterans Resource Center and Selim Center for Lifelong Learning on Nov. 4 asked six veterans to reflect on this question. History professor and Selim Center director David Williard moderated the panel, which was held in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium.
Williard opened by saying that historians and the public tend to only view veterans through lenses of valor or victimhood.
“We miss that veteranhood is perhaps the most fluid social and historical category,” Williard said. “It is much more a process than it is a label.”
Veteran’s Day emerged out of World War I as a commemoration of Armistice Day. President Woodrow Wilson said that the day “will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory,” according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
But Williard said that in American history, veterans have been “elevated to a status in which their experiences are almost made less human and more monumental because of social needs.”
“Veteranhood has been among the most widely shared, and yet least well understood, studied, investigated and engaged with identities … in all of United States history,” Williard said.
Veterans weren’t always revered when they returned home. Fred Keen, a Vietnam War veteran on the panel, recalled how when he and his fellow soldiers returned to Los Angeles, they were spit on by protestors.
In contrast, Sean DeKok, who served 18 months in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said, “We were never spit on. We were considered, all of us, heroes, even though we didn’t really feel like it.”
Talking about their military experience was not easy for the panelists, regardless of how long ago they were discharged. The conversation, which lasted nearly two hours, got emotional at times as panelists recalled memories of service.
Several panelists said that after being discharged from service, the return to civilian life was a disorienting experience.
“One morning you wake up … and the commander tells you, ‘Thank you for your service, you’re free to go.’ And you’re like, ‘What does that mean?’ … then you’re supposed to just return to your normal life,” DeKok said.
“It was a life-altering experience,” said Darryl LeMire, an Army helicopter mechanic in the Vietnam War. “I came home at 23 years old. I had no idea how it changed me until I got here.”
Those who served stateside said one of the hardest parts about being a veteran is the feeling of guilt for not having deployed in active combat zones.
Ross Sublett, an Army medic who served at Fort Sam Houston in Texas during the Vietnam War, said that for him, “the military was compartmentalized, and I just didn’t even think of that part of my life for years and years to come.”
“I was a damn good medic … and I have this little shade of guilt about not going to Vietnam,” Sublett said.
Others viewed their non-combat roles differently. Bruce Gleason, chair of the Department of Music, Film and Creative Enterprise at St. Thomas, was also on the panel. He served in the Army band in Berlin from 1989 to 1991.
“I was a soldier musician, not a musician soldier,” Gleason said. “I could still probably take an M-16 apart with my eyes closed and put it back together.”
Air Force veteran Kaitlyn Baum was the only undergraduate student on the panel. She was stationed at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado from 2016 to 2020, working in public health. She also helped facilitate around 80 funerals as a part of her role in the honor guard.
Baum teared up while saying that though she left the service almost seven years ago, she is still “struggling with coming to terms” with the fact that she never deployed.
“I never connected with being called a veteran just because I didn’t deploy,” Baum said. “I was stateside. I was safe the whole time.”
DeKok and others on the panel reassured Baum, saying she did exactly what her country asked of her.
“You completed your service in an honorable way and so there’s no reason to feel less than. And support staff is what makes everything else actually work, so thank you,” DeKok said.
Abigail Peters can be reached at pete4956@stthomas.edu.
