Re: [HoE] Veteran's Day [ot]

[Jeffery D Vogan <phelan@eriecoast.com>]

<smiles sadly> It is curious that I read this while I was watching "Welcome Home:
Veterans in the 20th Century" on the history channel and thinking about my father
( WW2 vet who passed away 3 years ago). Thank you Allan. I am also a veteran but
my service was mostly peacetime and my only combat time was a few weeks in Panama
during the invasion in 1990. Except for Desert storm  US veterans are often
forgotten and people seem to forget that the freedoms they enjoy were paid for in
the blood sweat and tears or those young men and woman they forget.. Again I say
Thank you Allan.

Allan Seyberth wrote:

> In honor of the military themes within the Hell On Earth and Deadlands
> games, I'd like to repost something I posted last year.
>
>                                                WHAT IS A VETERAN?
>
> Some veterans bear visible signs of there 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 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 Basic Training Company drill instructor who never seen combat -
> but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and
> gang members into Soldiers, 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 he 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
> their's.
>
> 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 protesters to burn the flag."
>
>         Father Denis Edward O'Brien, USMC
>
> -------------------
> Allan Seyberth
> darious@darious.com
>
> Why did the chicken cross the road?
>
> Thomas Paine:
> Out of common sense.
>
>
>
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