Children's books about Veterans Day 🇺🇸

Hello, good people.

The weather has finally turned here — we lit our first fire of the season on Friday night (each year we see how long we can go heating the house with only our wood stove rather than turning on the furnace, a game my husband and I partake in with glee; our children, not so much); my eldest daughter and I shivered our way through her Brownie meeting on Sunday afternoon in 46-degrees-and-pouring-rain. Still, despite — no, because of — the challenges of living in this climate, I’m grateful for the stark contradiction of the seasons, especially the cold ones (seasons, not contradictions, and there are basically three cold ones, though contradictions abound).

How the sun slants suddenly from an utterly different angle, even at midday, hanging at about 2 o’clock in the great timepiece of the sky just when we have finally gotten used to trusting again that it will remain steadily overhead. How the drawers in my daughters’ dresser are, for a time, a muddled mishmash of clothes to stay cool and clothes to stay warm and the demarcation line between those two needs is never as clear as I’d like it to be (and how small children resist this sartorial change reliably and inexplicably). How the frost kills off the late summer vegetables but concentrates all the sugar in the root veggies of autumn, calling them into sweetness as a protective measure, without which their cell walls would burst.

I wonder what it would be like to fully trust, body and mind, that the world has been changing for a number of years bigger than my tiny human brain can hold; that it’s okay to let go of clear lines and my Birkenstock sandals and everything I am so sure I know; that every October I remember I actually love leaning into the gloaming, that the year I advised myself to not be so afraid of the dark was the year I figured out how to make it through. What if bringing forth our own sweetness is something we choose, not only to survive — though there’s that — but simply because the sweetness is its own kind of succor, relief, and reward?

Can we allow ourselves that? What might happen if we did?

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What we’re reading

• Favorite Stories to Read Aloud edited by Margaret C. Farquhar, compiled by Oscar Weigle

• Always Room For One More by Sorche Nic Leodhas

• A Dark, Dark Tale by Ruth Brown

• The Biggest Pumpkin Ever by Steven Kroll

• Toys Go Out by Emily Jenkins (our current read-aloud)

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Mini issue: Veterans Day

Last May I did a mini issue on Memorial Day (back when these Tuesday missives had a different name) wherein I explained my feelings about Memorial Day versus Veterans Day in probably way more detail than anyone cared to read. (In short, Memorial Day is about the dead — the booklist I shared featured titles that recognize that — whereas Veterans Day includes the living. The end.)

If I was a faithful daughter I would simply recommend reading aloud any speech of Douglas McArthur’s for Veterans Day, specifically (though not limited to) his Farewell Address to Congress (aka his “Duty, Honor, Country” speech) which I heard no less than twice annually pretty much every year of my life, when my father would sit and recite excerpts while crying. (I love you, Dad 😘 ) It’s a tremendous speech and worth crying over but not actually all that fit for a young child, so here are some good books to read with your kiddos, if quoting directly from William Manchester’s American Caeser (my dad’s biography of choice) isn’t your jam:

• Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops by Dr. Jill Biden

• Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code: A Navajo Code Talker’s Story by Joseph Bruchac

• My Red Balloon by Eve Bunting

• Tuesday Tucks Me In by Luis Carlos Montalvan

• Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine & a Miracle by Major Brian Dennis, Kirby Larson, and Mary Nethery

• Night Catch by Brenda Ehrmantraut

• Granddad Bud by Sharon Ferry

• Hero Dad by Melinda Hardin

• Hero Mom by Melinda Hardin

• Brave Like Me by Barbara Kerley (this specifically addresses deployment in a kid-friendly, photo-journalistic way, which I like because it shows veterans aren’t just older people who served in some long-ago war but also people we see every day — at the grocery store, down the street, and in our case, literally in our own home)

• Sergeant Reckless: The True Story of the Little Horse Who Became a Hero by Patricia McCormick

• At the Mountain’s Base by Traci Sorell (inspired by pilot Ola Mildred Rexroat, a Oglala Lakota citizen and the only Native American Air Force Service pilot in WWII)

• America’s White Table by Margot Theis Raven (honors the dead on Veterans Day)

• Rags: Hero Dog of WWII by Margot Theis Raven

• H is for Honor: A Military Family Alphabet by Devin Scillian

There is still a glaring absence of titles that address the Iraq and Afghanistan wars specifically (though many books published in the last 15 years, especially those that cover deployment, feature sandy locations and desert BDUs/combat uniforms). The book that has come the closest to addressing anything our kids can make sense of is The Librarian of Basra by Jeannette Winter, which is excellent but does not at all explain why their father was overseas, what he did there, and why. And maybe that’s okay — they always have a lot of questions when the subject of his time in Iraq comes up, and not everything has to be, or even probably should be, handled through reading (I cannot believe I’m saying this and no, I have not suffered a recent head injury 😊 ) But it would be nice to see a children’s book about the last 20 years of American military history, if only so that the kids of the 125,000+ troops deployed in Iraq alone can know about this part of their grownups’ lives.

In any case, when November 11 rolls around in two weeks: if it applies to you, happy Veterans Day. If it does not, please remember that a great many people in this country (across both aisles and on every inch of the political spectrum) sacrificed — at the very least — important parts of their lives so that we can freely do a thousand things we take for granted every day. I don’t always love or agree with every part of the American experiment, past or present, but I’m grateful to the people who have believed in it enough to give their time, their bodies, their peace of mind, and sometimes even their lives in service of that wild dream.

To that end, this issue is dedicated to the following people:

• My grandparents: Marjorie (Army), Stewart (Army), and Fritz (Navy)

• My dad, John (Marine Corps and Navy)

• My uncle, Bob (Air Force)

• My father-in-law, Marc (Marine Corps)

• My lifelong friend, TJ (Marine Corps)

• My husband, Matt (Marine Corps)

I love you all, and I will be proud of your service as long as I live.

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Read good books and take good care 😘
Sarah

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