JS Tip 553: Reflections on Veterans Day (Next Monday)

We didn’t write this.

We found this on the internet. A beautiful, loving, unsigned tribute:  

Some Vets bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, the thousand-yard stare.

Others 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 America safe wear no badge of honor. You can't tell a Vet just by looking.

But he is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles were good to go.

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 South Korea's DMZ.

She—or he—is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for a year in Vietnam.

He is the drill sergeant who has never seen combat—but had saved countless lives by turning couch potatoes and ex-gang members into disciplined soldiers.

He is the parade-riding Legionnaire who pins on his medals with a prosthetic hand.

He is the career quartermaster who has watched the ribbons and medals pass him by.

He is one of the two anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington Cemetery must forever preserve 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.

Vets are ordinary and yet extraordinary human beings—patriots who offered their lives' most vital years in the service of their country, and who sacrificed their ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.

We must say “Thank you.” Sincerely. Respectfully. Engagingly.

They deserve our thanks.