Today is Veterans' Day here in the U.S.A. It also happens to be the Catholic feast of St. Martin of Tours. By an interesting twist of fate, Argentina's chief founding father, José de San Martín, happens to be linked by name to the patron saint of Buenos Aires: St. Martin ("San Martín") of Tours. José de San Martín was a general, and quite a good one; St. Martin of Tours was a Roman soldier who refused military service on the grounds that Christ demanded pacifism of him. San Martín is buried in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires, a place in which any knowledgeable Catholic praying for Buenos Aires would naturally render some special homage to St. Martin. And here I am, a North American with a mind still partially full of Argentina, thinking about both on my own country's Veterans' Day.

One of my grandfathers was a veteran of the Korean War, and my grandmother (his widow) tells me that he would always get emotional when he heard patriotic marches like "The Stars and Stripes Forever". Living in a post-Vietnam War U.S., I suppose that I would say that war is a terrible evil and that, anyway, it's a terrible thing to deny veterans respect for serving their country and ours. The military in Argentina, at any rate, has historically been heavily involved in regime changes and provisional governments, including the horrible dictatorship from 1976-1983. The war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982 was a terrible event intimately bound up with all that, and, still, it gave Argentina a long list of people to honor on their Veterans' Day, national heroes trampled in a national tragedy. It's churlish not to honor the good in your country even in the midst of its evils; I proudly honor my country today, and I'm glad to remember my time in Argentina and the many displays of sincere patriotism that I saw there.

St. Martin of Tours, as medieval people might tell you, was a swell guy, and José de San Martín, as any Argentine worth his salt will say, was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We must all strive for peace and honor our homelands; and, as it seems to me, Argentina's naming coincidence is a nice piece of happenstance.