Thank you, vets

Internet friend Joe Bryant sends this out every year, I may have posted it before but if so it's worth a repeat:

WHAT IS A VET

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.

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.

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 parade—riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a
prosthetic hand.

He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.

He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at
the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the
anonymous heroes whose valor dies 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 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.”

Remember November 11th is Veterans Day.

“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 Dennis Edward O’Brien, USMC