Veterans Day is a somber day.
Every year we honor the Veterans, as we should. They served our country and like most posts will tell you with the same somber songs, some paid the ultimate price.
Every year it’s the same thing. The same flags. The same wreaths. The same stories.
And then we move on.
The families don’t. The people who served don’t. The veterans living on the street right now in this country don’t. The veterans in wheelchairs with missing limbs and the veterans with wounds too deep to see, don’t. The veterans waiting for hours in the waiting room at their local VA hospital, don’t.
This year just feels trite for so many reasons.
We shouldn’t need a military; the world shouldn’t be at constant war, but as long as we have mad men in charge, we will need defense.
I get it.
This year we have men and women serving overseas in wars no one asked for, and ordered by a President who cares about not a single one of them, using people as pawns and his own personal armor that he himself was too cowardly to don when it was his turn to be called up.
Bone spurs. What a fucking joke he is.
I don’t look at serving in this U.S. military right now as an honor. If it’s boots on the ground it’s all sacrifice, and I was prepared to fight until the bitter end if there was going to be a draft.
Not my kids.
They have passports now for a reason.
Today, I will honor, one last time, my two favorite veterans.
If politicians were veterans there would be one on the left and one on the right. The one on the left, a Democrat. The one on the right, Republican.
My veteran on the left is my stepdad; my veteran on the right is my bio dad.
Both served in the Vietnam War. Both are loved and gone, but never forgotten.
I hope my veteran on the left is floating in the clouds, forever perched in his favorite chair with his favorite western movies and a Golden Corral within arms reach at all times.
My veteran on the right, I don’t want him in hell because I love him a lot, but I hope he had to do 10 years of hard manual labor; maybe ditch digging, with labor pains, and then I wish him a spot at his favorite pond stocked full of catfish, with his helicopter nearby so he could fly to his favorite casino with his favorite buffet of all-you-can-eat crab legs and endless poker games. If the universe obliges me, he has two years left to serve before he gets those crab legs.
My veteran on the left was a nurse on the ground, battling the elements in enemy territory. He came back and had haunting nightmares until the day he died. He told me stories of scorpions and snakes; a recording I was lucky enough to have the presence of mind to get in April 2025, two months before he died.
My veteran on the right, my bio dad, flew medivacs to and from combat zones, picking up the wounded. He told me once, “he would go back in a second.” He told me stories of being shot at in the sky, shoving a man in a gurney into the helicopter only for the gurney to go flying out the other side of the chopper…poor guy, to being pissed at having to pick up a soldier under enemy fire for having nothing more than a broken arm. I wish I would have recorded those stories. My veteran on the right was a funny man.
My veteran on the left was on 100% disability due to the multiple negative health effects of being in the Vietnam War, including Agent Orange. He couldn’t take pain medicine and, after fracturing a hip in 2024, spent a year being tortured by multiple hospital systems that ultimately fatally failed him, including his local VA. They wouldn’t even give him a wheelchair for months. He had to use my dead grandmother’s rusted broken down wheelchair. And after a year of torture and pain and tears and hard work and fighting for even his basic necessities, we were robbed of the honor of being beside him as he took his last breath.
My veteran on the right died of lung cancer and had enough meds to keep him comfy for years before the second round of chemo hit him hard and died within days. I had the honor of being beside him as he took his last breath, and watching him pass made me believe more than ever that there is something waiting for us to return.
My veteran on the left, left me with a hat that says, “The cost of freedom can be seen at your local VA.”
My veteran on the right left me a blanket with a cigarette burn in it that says, “Freedom isn’t free.”
Both are correct.
My veteran on the left couldn’t afford college so he went into the military so he could attend college when he got out on the GI Bill. The price of college is still so high I imagine there are still many men and women risking life and limb just for the possibility of being able to afford a higher education in the richest country in the world.
This is the U.S.A. and how we treat our veterans, or don’t, is a reflection of how little we value human life once it’s ‘served its purpose’.
We put flags in the ground, post our Canva made posts, add a comment to someone’s page, and lower the flags in the sky to half-mast.
Then we store them away for next year and move on to the next ‘thing.’
This Veterans Day I wanted to honor my veterans by calling for change.
If we really want to celebrate the sacrifice of the men and women who have served in this country and the ones who are lucky enough to still be with us, we should demand better health care, better mental health services, and get them off the streets. Again, in the richest country in the world, we should be able to do that.
My veteran on the left was an auxiliary police officer in Sedalia, MO and always followed the rules.
My veteran on the right used his police buddies to torment my veteran on the right by charging him with a bogus crime he didn’t commit out of sheer jealousy, which was later proven bogus, meanwhile losing his job and us all being run out of town, his daughter, me, included in that exodus.
The duality of man. Right?
Identifying information blacked out on Mr. Officerman’s police car due to personal safety concerns for myself and my children.
Last Sunday I saw Mr. Officerman sitting in one of his usual spots around the pickup/dropoff of my kids, this time cleverly in front of a Sedalia Gun Show sign in a little town in Missouri. This little town loves their gun show signs-two in one month! KC Expo, now Sedalia Fairgrounds.
It took me a year to manage my anxiety around dropoff and pickup of my children; I learned how to self soothe, breathe when I drive onto the off ramp, and a lot of self-talk…”this will be over soon.” I had to learn how not to break out into a sweat and calm my nervous system so my kids don’t see me visibly triggered by this police officer who should make me feel safe, but makes me feel threatened. I also learned how to ask for help on weeks that I just couldn’t handle seeing him twice in one weekend.
Last weekend, I was triggered more than usual because it was the weekend before Veterans Day and I was reminded of my veteran on the left-only it felt disgusting. Like I’d been draped in tar. My veteran on the left would never target or intimidate a woman like this. That would more likely be the job of my veteran on the right.
The Republican.
Democrats don’t stalk and use fear and intimidation and militarize police against their own citizens.
If 2026 taught us nothing else, it did teach us this. Right, ICE?
Mr. Offcierman is nothing if not punctual; every trip, every weekend, I can count on him to be there, parked in at least three of his usual spots. I’m sure my camera roll shows over time all his different vantage points because as much as I’d like to believe he’s friendly, my instincts tell me not to trust anything about this.
Because never once, in my entire life, has a police officer helped me or made me feel safe. Not even once.
They were the problem. Always.
One dad, the one on the right, militarized our small town through his connections with the sheriff’s department, against my mom and my veteran on the left; which meant he militatized it against his own daughter.
Unintended consequences be damned. He should have thought about that before he pulled the trigger on the demolition of his family.
3 police stations. 3 different cities. I was laughed out of them all.
During a time Impact Dinner in Chicago, Ashley Judd said, “It takes a village to raise a violent man.” Quoting activist Jackson Katz, she explained that violence exists along a continuum, extending beyond physical and sexual assault to include disrespect, microagreesions, ignoring a woman’s boundaries, among many others. “There’s no such thing as a non-complicit bystander, because if you really want to support survivors, you become an upstander. You heal the village, you heal yourself, and you hold men accountable.”
If you’re looking for a good place to start raising violent men, look no further than the military, a toxic or uncaring coach, a negligent or abusive parent, peers at school, bad actors, or a little Missouri gas station.
How does this all fit together, you ask?
Women are in the military too. Women are being raped as an act of war both abroad and at home. This current administration will not only protect a man, but celebrate a man for his dominance. Our little boys just learned that this administation was about to televise an execution and joked about Dana White becoming the next White House press secretary. Meanwhile, women learned there’s no one to call.
ICE in Minnesota. Those people should get a medal of honor for having served the country this last winter. People put their own lives on the line to document the war at home. A war waged from within by the person in the highest form of office sworn in to serve and protect.
I think we are all veteran’s now, signed up unwillingly by a cruel and murderous President with Ego Derangement Syndrome, and the effects will be ever-lasting for many.
The “unintended” but very well informed history of the consequences of war includes blowing up a school with 200 children inside, “necessary” civilian casualties, veterans who come home legless, armless, or with nightmares for the rest of their lives, and that’s if they even make it home.
If we really want to honor veterans and American citizen’s lives, we will stop these senseless wars, stop militarizing our police, the very people hired to keep us safe, who now keep us in fear, and we will prioritize healthcare for every veteran who has served.
That would be a Veteran’s Day to not just sit in remembrance, but celebration.
I will always love my veteran on the left, and my veteran on the right.
Here’s a snippet of my veteran on the lefts’ experience in Vietnam.
This is also worth noting. Freedom of speech and differences of opinion should not lethal in America.
Thank you, Veterans of America, for your service in whatever capacity you served, then and now.
