When my father ran off to the war, he was a teenager. Idealistic. Full of adventure. A poet boy.

When he came back from the war, he was a man. Broken. Angry. Hardened.

He was not alone.

War is not pretty. It is not easy. It is not an adventure. Yet, when I see photos of my father and the other young men who journeyed far from home eager to quell the Nazi advance and bring peace to a troubled world, I do not see fear in their eyes. I do not see ‘the ugly’.

I see the belief they were going off to fight for freedom, or as a commentator on the radio called it, “the good war”. For many of those young men who headed off with their heads held high and their beliefs strong, it was a fight to the death.

For men like my father, it was a war that left them troubled and angry, isolated and silent. It was a war that left them fighting for peace from the memories of the battles they could not leave behind, just like they could not leave their brothers lying lost on the battlefields of foreign soils.

Today, as I do every Remembrance Day, I shall stand with hundreds of others and honour the boys and men who never came home and those who did after sacrificing so much. I shall lay my poppy at the feet of the unknown soldier who graces Memorial Park in the downtown core and as I lay it down, I shall raise my eyes up to the sky and pledge to my father that I will not ‘make war no more’.  Not in my heart. Not in my life. Not in my world.

My father left this world many years ago carrying with him the poet boy who never came back from war. The boy who sometimes, in the silence that the man who became my father held onto to forget all that he had witnessed, appeared in letters he wrote, or poems he sent when we lived an ocean apart. It was in those notes I felt the loss of the poet boy my father kept hidden behind his anger and his silence.

To honour the sacrifice of his youth and the man he might have become had war not stolen the boy, and the sacrifices of so many young boys who fought so that we could have our freedom today, I must pledge to ‘make war no more’. And in that pledge, commit to the peaceful path; the path of Love. It is the only way I know to honour the many who lost their lives to war.

If we could all put down our arms of war and open our arms to embrace one another in Love, then perhaps this troubled world will find the peace and harmony for which they fought so hard.

In letting the guns fall silent, we must let nothing separate us from taking a step towards one another so that we can stand, arm in arm, and make peace amongst all humankind.

Namaste.

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When my daughters were young, we listened to this song over and over as we drove to the coast. It is a powerful anthem for peace.