Today is Veterans Day. It was established to honor the date World War I ended in 1918: “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” or 11:00 a.m. on 11/11. It celebrates all who have served, in any era, in any of the services. (Photo at top is my great-uncle’s grave in France.)

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World War I ended on this date in 1918. The total number killed in the four years of war: 11 million military personnel and seven million civilians. Fighting took place in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia. Sea battles were fought in the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million individuals that year was helped in its deadly course by the conflict.
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Sir Henry Morton Stanley, an explorer and journalist, was given the job of covering the Middle East and Africa for the New York Herald, an assignment which included a possible adventure: a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone had launched a search for the source of the Nile River in 1866 and no one had heard from him since. It was 1870.

On this date in 1871, near Lake Tanganyika, after an eight-month journey, the journalist found his story and his man. In his book about the encounter Sir Henry reports that he hailed the missionary with this sentence: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” but he destroyed the pages in his diary about the encounter so it is not known if this most famous greeting ever was uttered in real life. Dr. Livingstone made no mention of it in his memoirs, either.
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Us versus them. It was served with our breakfast cereal, our school lunches, and the nightly news watched during dinner. The Cold War was a fact, a background noise, a tinnitus-like hum heard 24/7, sometimes from far away and sometimes next door. Its removal seemed to make us aware that it had always been there, how loud it was, and that it had been driving us all insane.

The Cold War’s end could be said to have started on this date in 1989 as citizens of East Berlin started to spontaneously destroy the Berlin Wall (photo at top), a barrier erected in 1961 to divide that beautiful city.
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