I DARE YOU NOT TO CRY A BIT

In today's society, our warriors are not given the honor they so justly deserve. While they maynot be, in some cases, treated as harshly as our Vietnam veterans may have been when they returned, they are not given the honor they should get. Most are given indifference while some our mocked and ridiculed.

History has shown that many nations give their warriors a special place both in society and in the hearts of the very people they defend. This place is much deserved. You can rightly judge a nation on how it treats it warriors. Judge the nation on how it treats the very men and women who, without hesitation or reservation, volunteer to lay their life on the line every day in order to keep the battle anywhere but here at home. They leave family and friends behind for months on end in order to ensure that someone else, whom they have never met and might have very little in common with, gets a chance to have a sliver of the freedoms that many here in the U.S. take for granted and place very little thought on or about.

Many country's don't allow some of the basic freedoms we have. It isn't every country that allows you to march to the nation's capital and protest. It isn't every country that allows you to write what you want about your government and put it in the paper. In some country's the newspaper is controlled, or at the very least tightly scrutinized and edited, by the government.

So when you find someone or some people who take time or make time to ensure that our warriors get the respect they deserve in life OR in death, that person is special. And then to learn he or she is not a veteran and does it out of a love for our men and women in uniform, they become even more special. The emotions and thoughts that veterans feel for these people is very similar to the emotions brought on by watching our flag wave and hearing our anthem play. For both of these, to veterans, are much more than the sum of the parts. I believe, for veterans, the flag and the National Anthem evoke much more emotion and bring it from deeper within than they do for your average citizen. We spent years under that flag, hearing it wave in the wind, feeling it block the sun to cool us in one second and moving away the next allowing the sun to hit our backs. The National Anthem is a song we hear more times a year than I could count. It reminds us why we do what we do and of those who did it before us.

To this gentlemen in Texas, from a veteran in Pa, sir I say thank you for giving our men and women what they so richly deserve.