Dear List Members, I am giving you the opportunity today to honor the
soldiers in your family, alive or dead, who have given of themselves to make
America the great nation it is today. Please send in their names, the war
in which they served (or peacetime years), and your relationship to them.
Mine will follow in a moment. (Please take a moment to read the following
and be sure not to miss the poem at the end.)
Terry Black Temples
This was copied from the University of Minnesota at Cranston website. May
God Bless those who
serve now and those who have served in the past and their families:
What is a Veteran?
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 America safe wear no badge
or emblem.
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 Saudi Arabia sweating two
gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of
fuel.
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 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 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 protester to burn the flag."
Father Denis Edward O'Brien, USMC