Over the years, I have had many opportunities to speak to college students about a career in humanitarian aid. Often, they perceive my work as limited to non-threatening environments. This compels me to provide a clearer understanding of the role:
I want to tell you about a friend of mine, a guy named Jason. Jason served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His life was constantly under threat and sometimes, direct fire. Thankfully, Jason is now safely home. But he’s had some challenges since he got back.
At this point in my lecture, I asked if anyone could guess what some of those challenges are? The students responded with sensitivity to what many veterans have faced on return from combat deployments: symptoms of PTSD, trouble finding employment and the challenge of re-integrating back into society.
Next, I asked, “Do you have any ideas for how he could get some help?” They suggested seeking help through services from the government and private sector, including counselling available through veterans’ benefits, and the GI Bill to study or train for a new type of work.
The only problem is that Jason isn’t in the military. He is a humanitarian aid worker. He led the emergency response team into Iraq in 2003 for an international non-governmental organization (NGO). Years later in Afghanistan, he served two years as the Country Director, in charge of hundreds of staff all working unarmed and under the constant threat from insurgents and opportunistic criminals who often targeted anyone partnering with the Afghan or Iraqi governments, and foreign military or international aid organizations.
He lost colleagues in both countries.
Now, the classroom was quiet. The students had presumed Jason was in the military. They had not considered the service of humanitarian aid workers who also respond in times of war to protect the civilian populations trapped or displaced from the fighting. These responders include nurses, doctors, logisticians, engineers, epidemiologists, and generalist project managers, among others. The students’ perceptions mirror those of our broader society that associates battlefield service predominantly with a military uniform.
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This weekend, we honor those who have served in the military with Veterans Day. The event was originally known as Armistice Day to mark the agreement to end the fighting of the First World War on 11 November 1918. Reverence for the day deepened over the next few years, as the United States, England, and France all held ceremonies to bury an unknown soldier in each nation’s highest place of honor, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Following the Second World War, the U.S. Congress passed a bill to honor all veterans which changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
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On this Veterans Day, I am writing from a cold, rain-soaked village in the U.K., having returned because of something special I first experienced on this day nearly 30 years ago.
In the U.K., Armistice Day has evolved into Remembrance Day, which is misleading because the commemoration really begins at the start of November, when little donation cans start to appear next to boxes of red paper poppies in shops, churches, and post offices. People donate a coin which supports veterans and pin a poppy onto their jackets. With this small gesture, a signal of thanksgiving and reflection is sent to everyone whose paths you cross for the entire month.
What I remember…
We assembled quietly and stood silently in the churchyard. A light rain whispered into my umbrella, and I shivered, not yet wise to secret of surviving cold temperatures: layers. My first eighteen years had not tested this knowledge. Now I was a student abroad in England, discovering new ways of thinking about the world and my place in it.
A few minutes before the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, we gathered around a stone cross whose base contained the names of the young men from this village killed in the First and Second World Wars. We were young and old, civilians and veterans, a few who could recall the faces of the names inscribed in the stone before us. Some gathered every year for this service and others, for the first time. All wearing a red poppy, a symbol of Remembrance harkening back to the resilient flowers that appeared through the bleak, battle-scared fields in 1915.
A man in uniform with thinning white hair spoke The Exhortation:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
A bugler played Last Post during which a veteran slowly lowered his regimental flag until it rested on the ground in mournful salute. At exactly 11a.m. the bugle’s last note faded. We bowed our heads, joining every village, town, and city center across the land, for two minutes of silence.
After two minutes, the bugler sounded Reveille, the flag raised, and another veteran closed the service with the Kohima Epitaph:
When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.
Something shifted inside my soul. In the language of Remembrance Day—a title just one word apart from its U.S. counterpart—were the seeds of something broader, a collective action of remembering that captured a breadth and nuance about the experience of war I would come to appreciate many years later after my own service on the frontlines of 21st century conflict.
As one who made the non-traditional decision to support civil-military coordination whilst serving as an aid worker, I was afforded the opportunity to see the military as an outsider while having insider access. This perspective reinforces my observation that those who serve in war include both the military and humanitarian aid communities. We have a shared protection mandate and a commonly desired end-state: a stable community that poses no threat abroad or to itself.
When the U.K. government unveiled its memorial to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I felt for the first time that my service was uniquely captured. One side of the monument is dedicated to military service with the other side dedicated to the civilian response, especially the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Together, this weekend, whether you are celebrating Remembrance or Veterans Day, we all—military veterans, aid workers, and all manner of civilians connected to the call of service in defense of our freedom —have the opportunity to enter a conversation about the cost of war and recommit ourselves to work together for a better tomorrow.
In a way, Remembrance Day is a reset. In remembrance, we face the question: What am I taking for granted today? In our answer, we find the contribution we are called to make.
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