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A Vet is an Ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being who
Sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.
Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb,
a jagged scar, a 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 America safe wear no badge or emblem.
You can’t tell a vet just by looking.
Who is a Vet ?
He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia 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 39th parallel.
She or
he is the nurse who fought
against futility and went to sleep
sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.
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
never saw combat,
but who has saved countless lives by turning slouchy,
no-account
rednecks and gang members into soldiers, 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 Unknown,
whose presence at Arlington National Cemetery must forever
preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor died
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 a 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,
no matter what race, creed or color, just lean over and say “thank You”.
That’s all most of these 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".
Please Note
The above was written by a World War 11 correspondent, "Ernie
Pyle"
and was reprinted from the
Richmond Times Dispatch, A-8, Nov. 11, 1995. With a few modifications, I reprinted it from the Nov. 1996 issue of the
Scottish Rite Journal.
Thank you,
Don Grady |