Another Veterans Day comes and goes. As I get older it’s harder to suppress my animus. But I cannot dare or it will eat me alive.

This time of year it rears the ugliness. The dark truth. It’s set off online and in line as I approach the entrance to shop benignly at Market Basket.

Those silver haired, VFW adorned veterans soliciting donations for other veterans. They form a charming, united front this pair, as they flirt with the 60 to 80 year old ladies that come their way.

The ladies eating up the suave advances of those gallant, once young, soldier boys. Those forever young devils. My mind spills into disgust as I imagine if this is sex after sixty-five.

But down deep, I battle my guttural instinct to ask if they knew the soldier boys who raped my teenage mother.

Perhaps they knew them. Occupying the Rhineland a good decade after death’s decay was sanitized from my Strasse.

Those fine young men who casually destroyed a young girl’s life before it had chance to start, leaving her with two baby girls and twenty months later with me. In a home with not enough food to feed us. I would have to go.

Yes. Those wonderful boys in uniform giving of themselves to have a good time away a year, maybe two from their wives and children back in the states, defending “our way of life”.

Imagine how many Vietnamese, Korean and European bastards they left littered about those lands this past century? Abandoned. No money. No husband. No father. They’re left to fend for themselves and their alienated child(ren).

Thank you for your service.

However you say, not all of these servicemen were such cads. They’re mostly kind hearted, well trained and mannered young men representing you like a high school football team playing at some one else’s field.

True, after my teen mother gave me away she found a half-decent serviceman who actually went back home and divorced his wife, abandoning his daughter to return for his foreign bride. How did they feel about his service in that small Pennsylvania town?

yes once again, he wasn’t so half-decent to destroy his little girl’s childhood. Nor was he anywhere near human as he molested his new bride’s daughters, once he relocated them back in the States.

They weren’t his daughters.

He left them without a single word or finances for a year hitch in the ‘Nam. Imagine what this monster did over there to young girls?

But hell. Those were children of that foreign land that he was entitled to by virtue of his armament and status as a freedom fighter for them this time.

They weren’t his daughters. None of them were.

The Veterans who raped our teenage mother are probably dead now. I can’t thank them for their service to the darkest instincts of humanity. For flag and nation. Duty.

No I can’t thank them for my mother and half sister’s brief lives, the other sisters’ drug addiction, their mother’s neglect and mental breakdown.

We just have to live with it until we die. And we are set free. Home of the free because we had to brave their (self) service.