I spent Friday morning arranging for the U.S. Army Field Band’s visit to the Seaside Civic and Convention Center next March. Two senior non-commissioned officers went through the building with me and one of the center’s booking agents.

At this event, we’ll honor local veterans who have returned from Iraq. Arranging this concert was a fitting prelude to Veterans Day.

I don’t suppose there is such a thing as a pleasant or buoyant Veterans Day. After all, we are commemorating death in lonely circumstances. This year’s observance seems to me to be especially painful. The Iraq War is taking a toll in lives and on the emotions of families with soldiers in the combat zone.

The curious thing about the Iraq War is that you may walk down the streets of any American city and not observe any clue that we are a nation at war. There is no sense of shared sacrifice. We have not been asked to eliminate anything from our daily lives. When someone from the privileged class – like a Harvard graduate or Pat Tillman of the St. Louis Cardinals – goes to war, it’s news. Otherwise, this is a war fought by professionals who presumably need the job.

I received a letter last week from a veteran who disparaged our newspaper’s editorial page attitude toward President Bush and the Iraq War. I replied to the writer, saying that I was also a veteran. And wasn’t it interesting how we had come to opposite perspectives on the war. We are engaged in a war that our president doesn’t know how to end.I will not disguise my keen sense that our president doesn’t know what he’s doing in Iraq. And that’s a reason why I believe this is an especially painful Veterans Day.

The president and his war advisers have exposed our troops to a level of danger that cannot be justified in terms of a long-range mission. John Kerry might not have been the most compelling presidential candidate, but his question about the Vietnam War begs repeating. Paraphrasing Kerry’s words: How can you ask someone to be the last person to die in an unwinnable war?

I hope that coming back from the Iraq War is a better experience than coming back from Vietnam. I served in Vietnam as a Marine, 1966-1967. A veteran in those years quickly realized that no one wanted to talk about the war from which he had returned.

The experience of flying out of a combat zone and arriving in a suburb of Los Angeles is sufficiently jarring. When you discover that no one has interest in your bizarre, violent experience of the past 13 months, you recede within yourself.

I didn’t have fully-formed conversations about Vietnam until two years ago, when I got to know two war veterans in Astoria. With one of them in particular, I have regained a sense of the war’s absurdity. Of course, we are both ambulatory and all of our limbs work. And we had the good fortune to meet people who directed us to a better place.

I live in one of the very few two-veteran households of my generation. My wife was an Army nurse, 1972-1973. She had her own experience with the Vietnam War, seeing returning veterans – able-bodied and wounded. She has told me that she’s never known a more bizarre, risk-obsessed bunch than the Army officers with whom she partied who were combat veterans.

There is an illusion that America loves its veterans. I hope it’s different for the Iraq War vets, but our nation’s record on this point is otherwise. I urge you to view The Best Years of Our Lives. William Wyler’s movie is an unsparing look at the dark side of returning from World War II.

The saddest thing about the war in which we are now engaged is that our leaders don’t know how to end it. That means there will be more coffins returning home, more amputees and more shattered lives. I’m sorry folks, but that’s the real meaning of Veterans Day.

– S.A.F.