Happy Veterans Day (one day early)
My bad but I will be in a remote location for the next couple days...Deer season...
Thank you all of you fellow warriors. Thanks for the missed anniversaries. Thanks for standing in a dustbin while your child graduated from high school. Thanks for sucking up the hurt when you heard the day after your mother or father passed away realizing you may not be able to get back for the funeral. Thanks for putting America first, at least the part worth saving. Thanks for standing up when almost everyone else would not or had some excuse.
I want to say thanks for being a friend to me and a million other bros who needed someone to talk to when the freakin' world was just crushing you, but you had to jock up and move out anyway.
Thanks for putting up with the bad knees the broken backs and the torn rotator cups. Thanks for so many sleepless nights that you spent looking through some NVG or gunsight or at some radar screen or spent on a windswept hill overlooking a valley whose name you couldn't pronounce.
I thank you even now for that strong handshake or that free breakfast when I/we need someone who's been there to vent to. I'm sorry that you lost your marriage because you were "gone too much." And while I'm at it, thanks to all you wives and daughters and sons and brothers and sisters, moms and dads that had to sit back and wait, sometimes unsupported. Thanks for those mental and physical hardships, and thanks for understanding that that bonehead husband or daughter, or wife or son just has to get out there and "play Army" as one of my family members once accused me of.
I know you now have arthritis from many miles of carrying heavy rucks and I know you have mental scars just as bad. Although that sucks, thanks for doing the things that gave you those scars. Thanks as well for not bellyaching in front of our citizens but instead, for standing tall. That brings honor to our military and strength to our nation because millions of people knowing what we went through see us remaining strong. You are part of a very small percentage of society. You have courage, and you showed it.
You swore an oath and you upheld it. You developed integrity and that brought you honor which in turn brings our nation honor. You counted when we needed someone to grab that flag and start marching onward. And you marched off into an unknown. We who can read this were fortunate enough to have returned. Many of us feel we did not earn the right to still live and to return to normal lives while people we know and perhaps held passed from this life while wearing that uniform. But there is another hallowed day for them. Today is our day.
You did good, so happy Veterans Day.
