What is a Veteran?
From Member: Luke Gleeves UAW Local 2069
"War makes strange
giant creatures out of the little routine men who inhabit
the earth. "WWII correspondent-Ernie Pyle
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 alloy forged in the refinery of adversity. Except in
parades, however, the men and women who have kept American 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.
He is the Nebraska farmer, who worries every year
that this time the bank will foreclose.
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 Parris Island drill instructor, who has
never seen combat, but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy
no-'counts into Marines and teaching them to watch each others'
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 medal pass him by.
He is the anonymous hero in the Tomb of the Unknowns,
whose presence at Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve
the memory of all the other 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 his wife were still alive to hold him
when the nightmares come.
He is the 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.
This editorial was first published in 1995, Richmond
Times Dispatch.
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