WHAT IS A VET?
Some veterans bear visible signs of their service:
a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye.
Others may carry the evidence inside
them:
a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg,
or perhaps another sort of inner steel:
the soul's ally forged in the refinery of adversity.
Except in parades, however, the men
and women
who have kept
You can't tell a vet just by looking.
WHAT IS A VET?
He is the cop on the beat who spent
six months in
sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored
personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel.
He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber
than five wooden planks,
whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times
in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.
She - or he - is the nurse who fought
against futility
and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in
He is the POW who went away one person
and came back another - or
didn't come back AT ALL.
He is the Quantico drill instructor
who has never seen combat - but
has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks
and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other's backs.
He is the parade - riding Legionnaire
who pins on his ribbons
and medals with a prosthetic hand.
He is the career quartermaster who
watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.
He is the three anonymous heroes in
The Tomb Of The Unknowns,
whose presence at the
the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized
with them on the battlefield or in the ocean's sunless deep.
He is the old guy bagging groceries at
the supermarket - palsied now
and aggravatingly slow - who helped liberate a Nazi death camp
and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive
to hold him when the nightmares come.
He is an ordinary and yet an
extraordinary human being
- a person who offered some of his life's most vital years
in the service of his country,
and who sacrificed his ambitions so others
would not have to sacrifice theirs.
He is a soldier and a savior and a
sword against the darkness,
and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony
on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known.
So remember, each time you see someone
who has served our country,
just lean over and say Thank You.
That's all most people need, and in
most cases it will mean more
than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.
Two little
words that mean a lot, "THANK YOU".
"It is the soldier, not the
reporter,
Who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet,
Who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer,
Who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier,
Who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protestor to burn the flag."
Father Denis Edward O'Brien
USMC