WHAT IS A VETERAN

Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, an aged 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 forged in the refinery of adversity. Except in parades, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem. You can't tell a vet just by looking.
 
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 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 38th parallel.

He is the drill instructor that has never seen combat, but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into United States Soldiers, 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 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.
 
         "and when he gets to heaven, to saint peter he will tell: "Another soldier reporting, sir I've served my time in hell."