Shropshire Star comment: Gratitude to those who serve
Armed Forces Day is a relatively new thing for Britain. But the sentiments and motivations behind it – a desire to show our support to those who put themselves in danger so the rest of us can live in safety – are timeless.
There were events throughout the region which gave the public a chance to get behind our fighting forces.
It is one of those ideas which originated in America which has crossed the pond. In the USA, Armed Forces Day goes back 70 years. Here, it has been a slower burn, starting as Veterans' Day, which was first marked in 2006, and being renamed Armed Forces Day just 10 years ago.
In the 20th century Britain went through two world wars, both of which were people's wars in the sense that they affected everybody and every avenue of life. Mass mobilisation created a nation in uniform, and those who did not directly fight supported the war effort in some capacity, toiling in factories, working on the farms to produce the food to sustain the population, and so on.
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War was a common experience which led to common understandings which continued well after the coming of peace. Those of the war generations did not have to explain things. They just knew, and their peers knew.
A legacy of the relative peace we have enjoyed since 1945 has seen all that gone, and in the 21st century it is a relatively small band who have seen action in foreign lands such as Iraq and Afghanistan who speak a common language, understood among themselves, but difficult to get across to members of the general public.
Unless you were there, you cannot know the real pressures of being sent out on patrol every day in Afghanistan, knowing that while you have been in your fortified camp there have been people planting devices in your path to kill you. Find them, avoid them, or face death or mutilating injury. With grim military humour, soldiers would compare it to a "treasure hunt".
So the public are outsiders when it comes to those experiences, and it is thanks to the continuing heroism of the men and women who fight for us that we enjoy that luxury of ignorance of what war really means.
With Armed Forces Day the heroes are saying here we are, this is what we do. When they are putting themselves in danger abroad, we have no way of saying thank you to their faces.
This day means we can express our gratitude, admiration, and thanks – and they can see us doing it.
