It's Veteran's Day Right Now!

As I write this, it is precisely 11:00 am eastern/10:00 am central on November 11th.   This is the exact moment of the armistice in World War I in 1918, 95 years ago.   There were 116,516 American deaths in World War I, in a country with just over 100 million in population.   The equivalent figure today would be upwards of 350,000 deaths as a percentage of population.   We were involved in the war for a little over a year, so there were about 280 deaths per day during the war, or almost 2,000 per week.  

In the battle of the Meuse-Argonne, fought over the final six weeks of the war largely by the American Expeditionary Force, America lost more than 26,000 dead and more than 95,000 wounded.   The American military cemetery, which somehow our exalted leaders thought it fit to close during the government shutdown, looks like this:

We are a very different country now.   Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad.   We won't really know until the current generation, or a future generation of Americans, is called upon to sacrifice.   

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Lest we forget.