By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The rain on Monday morning fell on the blue Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap covering the head of Bruce Kamosko, a Navy veteran who was not about to let a little wet weather keep him from attending the Spirit of Princeton’s Veterans Day ceremony.
The 22nd annual service, held two days after Veterans Day, drew a smaller than usual crowd that braved a cold, raw morning at the All Wars Memorial. The old veterans who normally sit in the front seats were not there; neither were the schoolchildren who are regulars.
But for the people standing under umbrellas or bundled up, they paused to reflect on the service America’s veterans had provided the country.
Though the ceremony fell after the holiday, Mayor Liz Lempert said she was “glad we’re doing this, in some ways, not on Veterans Day as a reminder that it’s not just on Veterans Day we need to be remembering and thinking about our servicemen and women and our veterans and how we can be doing better by them.”
She called it a “tragedy” that many service members return home unable to get the “medical care they deserve,” and talked of their needs in getting jobs and finding places to live.
Roger Williams, the secretary of the Princeton Battlefield Society, picked up on the mayor’s theme of daily having veterans in mind.
“Honoring our veterans should not be a day but our duty every day as citizens,” he said.
In an apparent reference to the controversy surrounding how some professional football players don’t stand for the Star Spangled Banner, he said: “We can respect our anthem either standing up or on a knee. We can pledge our allegiance to the flag. We can thank them for their service.”
Earlier, Mayor Lempert reflected on how the youth of America have not ever known a time of peace, with Americans still overseas in Afghanistan.
“But I was just reflecting on the fact that our kids, our community and all across the country — they haven’t lived a day of their lives without our country being at war,” she said.
Bob Swierczek, speaking before the ceremony, recalled his time in the Navy, from 1971 to 1977, as a broadening life experience for a then-20-year-old man from a small town in Illinois. It took him to parts of the world he might never have seen and placed him in heavy responsibility working on an air search radar aboard a guided missile destroyer, the USS Dewey.
“It’s something that you can’t get in real life,” he said of that experience at a young age.
An Israeli woman, who gave her name as Patricia, said afterward that she was moved in watching, for the first time, how America honors its veterans. She said that in Israel, where she has a son in the military, the country has its version of Memorial Day, called Yom Hazikaron, that includes the blaring of a siren that causes people to come to a halt.
