Veterans Day

When I first moved to New England, I spent a year or so in Massachusetts before moving to the paradise that is New Hampshire. You can imagine my surprise one day while living in Massachusetts when I was given off work on April 19. Dumb enough to look a gift horse in the mouth, I inquired why we were being given the day off, and was told it was Patriot's Day.

Now, I come from a region that also has a football team but one which is more prone historically to losing -- quite unused to winning, in fact -- so I felt a tingle of bitterness that a region like New England with its more successful football franchise could be so arrogant as to actually have a public holiday for its football team. Fine, I declared, I'll take your day off work, but don't expect me to hang any Tom Brady posters around my home, I gruffed. After some embarrassed glances -- you know the kind, when you realize there's a hopeless fool in your midst but you don't want to humiliate them in front of a crowd -- I was taken aside by some coworkers and informed that while they did indeed feel the New England Patriots deserved a public holiday, that no, Patriot's Day was in commemoration of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord were, of course, the opening battles of the American Revolution, as the British forces occupying Boston launched an early morning raid inland to arrest a few dissident leaders and the gunpowder rumored to be stockpiling in towns surrounding Boston. Of course, as everyone knows, the raid went disastrously awry when the raiding party stirred the local militias, brushing them aside at Lexington but being surprisingly rebuffed at Concord and harassed all the way back to Boston, losing more than 200 soldiers on that long road back to sniping American farmers hiding in nearby woods and homes. Worse, the raid resulted in outright war.

Patriots Day is not celebrated in New Hampshire, only in Massachusetts, but those two battles set the stage for the next battle, the American siege of British-occupied Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Battle of Bunker Hill -- Breed's Hill, as purists will quickly point out -- was the ultimately successful British attempt to drive American forces from the one of the highest heights around the city, but the battle took such a toll on British forces and in any event didn't end the American siege so that the British abandoned Boston altogether. This was a major American victory, though it is overshadowed by the fact the British forces that evacuated Boston then sailed south and seized New York, humiliating newly-appointed General Washington so much with his rudimentary attempt to defend Manhattan that Congress almost fired him. Oops: win some, lose some. Anyway, those American "forces" that laid siege to Boston in 1775 were in fact a motley collection of New England farmers and untrained militia, not a real army in any sense. New Hampshire militia and their later famous commander, General John Stark, played a crucial role in the battle, helping to prolong the British agony in seizing the hill.

What does all this mean? It ultimately means that today, on November 11, 2010, I can write these words as a free man. Veterans' Day is actually based on the end of World War I, whose armistice ended the fighting at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month (in 1918), but we've set it aside as a day to remember all veterans. I salute all veterans, past and present.