Most people can’t imagine the things veterans have seen.
They have slept the mud, with no assurance that they will live to see the dawn.
They have lost limbs in explosions of dirt and rock while trudging through hostile third-world villages.
They have spent countless nights on an endless sea, waiting for the enemy to appear on the horizon…..
I remember the long frigid nights and days at the BMEWS station at Thule AB, Greenland, the unaccompanied tour of duty in the boreal forest of the Pinetree Line in northern Ontario, and the alerts in the 412L system while on duty close to the DMZ in West Germany…..never knowing if or when 125 Soviet armored divisions might come crashing through the Fulda Gap to overrun NATO units strung out along the line, and when we might have to rely on our dependents evacuating themselves to safety while we were on duty. I also remember the night when the BMEWS system went on Red Alert, and we thought the balloon had “gone up.” Very scary……and terrifyingly obvious that it could be the real thing thing. Yes, I never had to pull a trigger, but in a very real sense, that’s what all of us had to be prepared to do in the defense of everything we held dear.
It’s why we served……and why we still serve.
Cennydd,
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE!! (Caps intentional, I meant to shout it!!)
You and our other veterans are the true heroes of the world. Thanks to Veterans like you and my father and grandfather, I do not have to fear the “knock on the door” in the middle of the night. (Well at least not yet!!).
So thank you from a grateful nation!!
Cennydd–Please look at my comment #3 in Kennedy’s Veteran’s Day speech, below.
Recchip, thank you for your comments! Someone once said that no one hates war more than the soldier, and I believe those words still ring true today. The sad fact, though, is that we must always be prepared to do that which we hate the most, and we must be prepared to face the cost, however much we dread that cost.
I occasionally go to the Veterans’ Hospital in Palo Alto for scheduled appointments, and when I do, I meet fellow disabled veterans and their families. I see the cost of war every time I go, and I take great pride in having done my own part, while at the same time I feel compassion for those returning veterans and their families for having given so much in defense of the freedoms that we all enjoy.
May God bless each and every one of them!