I served in Afghanistan. Here’s why I’ve stopped going to ceremonies on Remembrance Day

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Benjamin Hertwig is the author of the novel Juiceboxers.

The year is 2002, and I am standing behind a podium in my high-school gymnasium. A teacher whose name I can no longer remember has asked me to recite In Flanders Fields for the school Remembrance Day ceremony. I am wearing the uniform of a soldier, a dress uniform to be specific, the same style that my father had worn when he served, the same dark green cloth that he found a decade later in a black garbage bag at the back of a closet.

This is perhaps the first poem I have ever read out loud. I have no experience with cadence or modulation or enjambment, but I am not thinking about the words or the act of reading at all. I do not care about John McCrae or where poppies blow and certainly do not know whether the eponymous field is in France or Belgium or Germany. I remember little about the reading beyond changing into and out of the uniform in an empty classroom, a symbolic transition from civilian to soldier that felt, at 17, like one of the most important things I had ever done. Even then, I knew that I was playing a role, reading a script. I am a performative substitute for the dead and am most happy to oblige, as long as my classmates think I look cool in my uniform.

A few days pass, and I am in my uniform again, drinking rum and Cokes with my fellow soldiers at the Junior Ranks Mess in Edmonton, then eventually at the bar. Somebody has peed in a glass under the table, and the glass is spilled, but the transgression is quickly forgiven. Remembrance Day is the soldier’s Christmas, after all: a sanctified day of celebration, a free chance to get drunk on Whyte Avenue, which I happily did, even at the age of 17. What exactly I was supposed to be remembering was never perfectly apparent to me then, and remains so to this day.

I cannot remember the last official Remembrance Day ceremony I attended. The closest, perhaps, is when I’ve been asked to read war poetry during school visits, which sometimes take place around Remembrance Day. I’ve read to children in kindergarten, and I’ve read to inmates in prison. I’ve probably done well over a hundred readings, but often find myself thinking about an assembly reading I was asked to give at a wealthy school in Vancouver. The organizer requested war poems and a brief talk, and some of his students would recite well-known poetry alongside my lesser-known work – the standard fare of John McCrae and Wilfred Owen. In the minutes before it began, he became increasingly irritated as a few younger boys warmed their hands over the ceremonial candles.

“Do you know what those candles represent?” the teacher asked. “You’re putting your hand over a dead soldier right now. Not the time or place.”

The students apologized, though he continued berating them until the Bluetooth speakers started malfunctioning, at which point he stormed off in search of a technological solution, while the students returned to playing with the dead-soldier candles – to kokeln, as they say in German.

What do I mean by kokeln? Throughout my childhood, whenever the children were messing around with candles at the dinner table, specifically, or with any kind of fire, in general, my Opa would loudly proclaim the following: Wer kokelt pischt ins Bett. They who play with fire piss the bed. My Opa, a veteran of the Second World War, had sayings for every occasion, and more than a few of them originated within the military. Fünf Minuten vor der Zeit/ist des Soldaten Pünktlichkeit, for example. Five minutes before the time/Is the soldier’s punctuality. As a child, I found his sayings funny. I hadn’t pissed the bed for many years and had no intention of doing so ever again. Consider me surprised, then, when I woke one morning after flying out of Afghanistan in my grandparents’ house with a wet bed.

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What had happened? In Afghanistan I had played with firearms; I had fired a rifle. Admittedly, this context was not what my Opa was talking about when he warned against those who play with fire, but I did piss myself nevertheless. I wasn’t intoxicated and had no medical explanation for what happened – just a mixture of fear and revulsion and a wet set of heavy linen sheets. Here I was, a 25-year-old man and a combat veteran, and I could no longer control my bladder. I hadn’t pissed myself during a firefight or during either of the suicide bombings I witnessed, so why now, in my grandparents’ guest bed? The bed-wetting happened twice more in the coming months, then stopped. The fear of wetting the bed, however, remained for a long time. For the greater part of a year, I avoided sleeping over at anyone’s house, and in the coming years I stopped going to Remembrance Day ceremonies altogether. I had been to more than enough.

I have a photo of myself as a child wearing my dad’s dress uniform. The jacket drapes over my shoulders and falls luxuriously at my feet. I am standing in front of the mirror in my parents’ bedroom, ensconced within the secure boundaries of my childhood home. The uniform smells like my father: Azzaro Pour Homme. The uniform feels safe because my father feels safe, and one day I will wear a uniform of my own. This too is an extension of the culture of war. Years later I wrote about the experience of burying a man from my platoon in small-town Alberta. I was wearing the dress uniform I had draped over my shoulders as a child, except this time the uniform no longer was a source of comfort. The uniform became an extension of my own anger at the banal futility of the War on Terror. A contained narrative that started with the burial of a man from my platoon ended with a discarded uniform in the back of a closet. I had not memorialized anything other than my anger. The picture no longer felt safe because the world did not feel safe. The soldiers I had seen die did so in their uniforms and were buried in the same. One of my foundational myths, the importance of the uniform, had been overturned. Not wanting to ever wear a uniform again, I still found myself asking the following: How do we appropriately remember the dead?

The only memorial I desire any more is this: a large red room, similar in affect to the room in which the fictional Jane Eyre is locked, but much larger. Big enough to contain a life-size portrait of the face of every soldier and civilian who has died in whatever happens to be Canada’s most recent war. In this red room, the light will never go out, and the eyes of the dead stare out forever – from the floor, the ceiling, from each of the four walls. Every politician who proposes war as a foreign-policy solution must spend a week in this room alone. No beds, no chairs, no clothing, no music, nothing to hide behind. Just a bare, red light bulb above and eyes on the wall, watching the motions of the living. Perhaps the dead will have something to say.