Veteran's Day

So... I'm not usually the one getting all goopy on holidays, and almost especially not on patriotic holidays. Not that I'm not patriotic, I love my country and such, but I like to think that I have a low simmer going on all year. This year though, for a couple of reasons, I'm feeling a little extra simmer of appreciation for our military members.

While in DC we stopped at the Vietnam memorial and there was like a ranger-type guy there talking about the monument and it was kind of stirring to see the deep reverence he felt for those who had given their life in Vietnam; he was of the age when many of them would have been his friends and I was never clear whether he had been in Vietnam or not.

While I was there, I thought about my brother who was overseas for two years (not consecutively) in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's pretty closed about those experiences (part of the, "you wouldn't understand unless you were there" thing) but I sometimes do get a sense of how much those years cost him.

I've been reading about Theodore Roosevelt, who was probably the first president to truly see himself and our country as tapped with influencing world events -- this had obviously been growing for a while, but I think he was the first to actively step in to world events that the US had no direct connection to, and I was thinking about the fact that that sense of world duty is what has put so many of our young men and women on the line in wars since: WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq -- most of which we joined on behalf of allies and not as the primary attackees/ers.

And the crazy thing is, I know a lot of those service men and women, and you know what? they really believe in what they are doing. They really are willing to put themselves in harms way to do what they feel they can to protect the freedom and rights of others, of strangers. They really do think they are doing the best they can to help people in other countries; to bring them that thing which we place so high a value on here in the US: Freedom.

And no matter what you think about our current or past wars; no matter how you feel about US foreign policy in general; no matter what you think about whether or not we should be imposing US-style freedom on other nations; I think that its incredible that as a nation and a culture we foster those kinds of young men and young women. I think that a nation that can produce so many people willing to make such huge sacrifices on behalf of others must be doing something right.

So a big thank you today to all current and former members of the armed services. You make our country proud. And you make me proud of our country.