Ninety years ago today the guns fell silent in Europe. On this day The Great War came to a close after all sides in Western Europe unleashed their remaining artillery stockpiles prior to the time the armistice was to take effect at 11:00 on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. WW I was a senseless war, fought mainly for pride and nationalism and led to the deaths of nine million people. The war was waged in the open fields of Russia, the mountains of Italy, the craggy terrain of Turkey and most conspicuous, the trenches of Western Europe. The “silent episode” of that war occurred in Turkey where Armenian Christians were rounded up and executed by Muslim Turks often referred to as the Armenian Genocide. Adolph Hitler, who had waged war for four years in the trenches on the Western Front would later, as dictator, reference the extermination of the Jews with the events of Turkey on his mind. “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

The impact of WW I is greatly underestimated since there would be no Second World War without the first. There would be no shaping the warrior mind of Adolph Hitler without it nor the conditions that would ultimately lead to a new generation to wage a more brutal war to settle old scores from the first. There would be no Holocaust which would see a race of people nearly wiped out. Without this string of events there would have been no reason for western guilt that led to the creation of the state of Israel as a haven for persecuted Jews. A haven that is seen by all the other occupants of the region as simply a new form of western colonization; one further complicated by religious hostility on both sides.

Without one war and thus the other there would have been no wartime nuclear program nor a Cold War, at least in the form it took after WW II, thus no Korean War nor Vietnam War and certainly no communist revolution in Cuba.

The lesson we should learn is a war of choice never ends in the way its executors envision…never, and WW I was no exception. Wars have a way of taking on a life of their own.

But on this day, Veteran’s Day we salute those who have kept this nation safe.  From the ill clad Patriots who forged this nation with their blood at Brandywine Creek and Saratoga to the naval gunners who blasted through British warships who had sealed off America’s harbors during the War of 1812. From Zachary Taylor’s boys firing with deadly accuracy their artillery pieces at the hard fought battle of Monterey to Joshua Chamberlain’s master stroke initiated by the 20th Maine at Little Round Top before the small town of Gettysburg. From the gallant doughboys who battled the Jerrys ferociously  in  the Argonne Forest with sure determination in 1918 to the green Marines who waged war against a determined foe in the jungles of Guadalcanal or the determined paratroopers who held their ground around the frozen town of Bastogne despite being cut off in the Christmas of 1944.   From the warriors of the 7th Infantry who held off a massive Chinese army at the Chosin Resevoir in Korea to the dogged determination of the Marines along the Perfume River town of Hue to extract the NVA from the ancient Vietnamese city. From those who routed Saddam’s army in the Gulf in 1990 to the special units who took on an entire city in the dilapidated hovel that is Mogadishu in Somalia in 1992. From those who fought house to house in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah with a fanatical enemy determined to die to those who walk point in the Korangal River Valley in Afghanistan. To all those who have fought and died to keep our nation prosperous, on this day and every day we honor their sacrifice and hope that the leaders who make the decisions to raise the sword will show as much wisdom as these boys have shown valor.