Just Another Veterans Day Essay -- Personal Narrative Essay Example

Just Another Veteran's Day    My grandmother and I stopped in DC before we met up with my parents to go on a trip. The fact that we were there on Veteran's Day was only a coincidence. True to my historically disinterested generation, the crowds of people as we left the hotel to walk towards the mall perplexed me. Only momentarily, of course; the hundreds of predominantly middle-aged men, defiantly strutting, proudly adorning their wheelchairs and various prosthetics, required little introduction and less explanation. Amidst them I, not yet 15, variably slithered with ignorance, the inexperience of war; and alongside, my Belgian-bred grandmother, veteran to a war these men could not know.    Uncharacteristically, I fell prey to tourist trappings: photographing the Lincoln Memorial, vainly attempting to hunt down and shoot the one angle of the Reflecting Pool that no one, in the history of history, had yet to see. Others swarmed... ...e there than I; their lack of respect condemned them to a hell in which I do not particularly believe. In an attempt to capture what we all saw but were unable to comprehend, they obliterated the very purpose of this apotheosis. These soldiers, soulfully searching the black mirror for a prosthetic for their soul, their sanity; a glimmer of sense in an event that defined madness: they deserved silence, solitude, peace. Instead, capitalism and greed spat in their face.