Veterans' Day 2005
The B2 Journal extends its gratitude and honors the men and women who serve or have served in the United States armed services. Today is Veterans' Day, a day of significance and unless you have served, it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much military personnel sacrifice while ensuring that your way of life is guaranteed.
Service means sacrifice
To many Americans, Veterans' Day is merely another legal federal holiday, a long weekend away from work. They know nothing of the many months of separation from wives, husbands, and children or mothers, fathers, and siblings. They have never given up many of their constitutional rights by voluntarily acceding to a strict chain of command and code of conduct.
They never earned so little while friends and neighbors stayed home and were employed in high-paying positions, amassed job seniority and retirement accounts, or attended university. They never battled the elements without the chance of respite, operated in hostile terrain and habitat knowing they couldn't go home if it got too severe, routinely performed hazardous duty around the clock, continued a mission after sustaining serious injury, experienced combat, or experienced the loss of a comrade up close and personal.
In military life there is no OSHA, no ACLU, no EPA, no EEC, no NOW, no union, and no relief shift. All who serve are equals with that which they must contend. There is no magic potion that will conjure up memories of children growing up in absentia, restore the years of missed opportunities in civilian life, or fill the void of loneliness stemming from the extended separation from spouses and loved ones. Yet as of this week and with America at war, enlistment numbers have increased from just six months ago.
Devotion to our way of life
How can this be? Why do these young men and women serve? Why do they volunteer for such hardship, for a commitment that demands so much personal sacrifice? Some would say that they only join for economic or scholastic opportunities, or to escape from horrible living conditions or family life. Quite honestly, this is probably true for a small segment of our volunteer military personnel.
But as a military veteran whose familial and professional lives are thankfully interwoven with those of other veterans, I know that the majority have and will serve for loftier principles.
We Americans do so because we are...Americans. Service to our nation and fellow citizens is what we do. It is who we are. Service and sacrifice for the national good is indelibly etched within most Americans because unlike any other nation before or since, ours is the only country that was born as a strict constitutional republic and designed to be governed by constitutional rule of law.
We have succeeded where all others have failed. This is the core, the essence of America - and service to preserve that essence, that common bond of freedom, comes naturally to all true Americans. That is why at somewhere near the age of eighteen B2 volunteered to serve his country; that is why so many millions of my brothers and sisters did the same.
Today, while you are out picking up some extra beer or charcoal and enjoying your long weekend, buy a red poppy flower offered by the VFW to help disabled veterans, make time to attend a Veterans' Day parade, or simply take a moment to thank a man or woman in uniform.
Americans chose not to do so once, not so long ago - and turned their backs on an entire generation.
Never again dishonor our veterans with such shameful acts.