I was kind of surprised to watch Joe Biden placing a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown this morning.  Firstly because that is an honor usually reserved for the president...the current one has conveniently arranged his schedule to avoid such pro-military activities today...correct me if I am wrong, but secondly, it is an honor usually conducted on Memorial Day.  And that is the crux of what has busted through my recent malaise and got me back at the keyboard.
When I was a kid, we understood that Memorial Day and Veterans Day were two separate holidays with two very different purposes.  Veterans Day started out as Armistice Day and was a celebration of the end of WWI and the servicemen who brought that about.  Somewhere down the line it became a day to honor all veterans from all wars.  Memorial Day, as the name implies, is a day to honor those who lost their lives fighting the wars of our country.  As I have put it myself and have heard others put it likewise...All gave some, Some gave all...Veterans Day is for the All who gave some...Memorial Day is for the Some who gave all.  But lately we seem to blur the distinction.  Don't get me wrong;  I am all for honoring GIs no matter what.  But by putting all the attention on the Some, it kind of waters it down for the All.  I have to admit at this point that I am flying by the seat of my pants on this one, I could Google up some facts to back myself up but I don't want to.  There are millions of veterans in the US today.  I don't know how many of them went to war...I would guess the percentage to be less than a third...probably a lot less.  Not even all the ones who did go to a combat zone were engaged in serious fighting.  The vast majority of veterans served in peacetime and a lot of them never even went overseas.

 
When I got out of the Army in '67, I worked at Walker Scott Department store in the College Grove Mall in San Diego.  The stockroom was right next to the mail room.  I met the mail clerk who was born and raised in San Diego, joined the Navy and went to boot camp in San Diego, was trained as a mail clerk at the Navy Training Center in San Diego, got assigned to the Base Headquarters at the 32nd Street Navy base in San Diego, and served out the rest of his four-year hitch right there...in San Diego.  See what I mean?  This was in the heat of the Vietnam War, too.  So the All includes an awful lot of sailors, soldiers, marines, and airmen who spent their time in uniform not fighting for their country.  Did their service mean less because of the times in which they served?

 
For fifty-some years after the end of WWII, the strength and expertise of the US military was the only thing that kept the Soviets inside their own borders.  I have mentioned before the General Officer in Germany who answered the question, "Do you really believe the Soviets will invade western Europe?  And when would you expect them to do it?"  with a terse, chilling statement..."On the very day they think they can."  I served in one of the border units in Germany where we all understood that we were nothing more than a "speed bump" if the Russians ever made their run.  Over my twenty-six year career, I spent nearly 14 years in NATO...waiting for the alert sirens to go off for real.  We didn't fight.  We didn't shoot.  But we studied war and practiced war and we worked hard to be ready for war.  And that effort is what kept the Russians at home.  All of the soldiers that I served with during that time deserve the credit and honor of this day;  they served...they wore the uniform...and they were there.  And their being there counts.  That is why I get a little crosswise with the leaders of this nation when they can't seem to keep the two holidays separate.

MamaCharlie used to call a lot of what I did, "Practice Sacrifice".  Sometimes we were sent away to places where our families couldn't join us...for a few days or a month or a year.  We got called out at two or three in the morning on an "alert" and spent the next three hours to a week pretending to defend against an attack...and our families sat at home not knowing if this one was the three- hour kind or the three-day kind or the three-week kind or the real kind that could wind up lasting a loooong time.  We went on field training exercises that could last up to a month, maneuvering all over the countryside, sleeping very little, eating out of a can (is there an old soldier out there who never noticed how much Spiced Beef smelled like Alpo Horsemeat Chunks?), pooping where the bears poop, washing and shaving out of a steel pot, digging holes so we could fill them back in, running and gunning and chasing each other through the woods in the middle of the night getting covered in pine pitch and pine-needle scratches, living in the same underwear for way too long at a time, and enduring every extreme of weather all in the name of accomplishing the mission.  We called it "training".  We did it so that if we ever had to call it "real"...we would be danged good at it.  

Sometimes in the name of duty, we missed family birthdays, anniversaries, Christmases, or other special days.  The first ten years I was in the Army, I had "duty" on either Christmas or Christmas Eve or New Years or New Years Eve every year.  I started saving a few days of leave every year so I could take a short leave during the holidays to ensure I would actually be home.  
In the name of service to my country, I have eaten crap that no man in his right mind would eat.  I have sat on an up-turned ammo box or leaned against a tree to return that crap to its natural habitat.  I have gone without a change of clothes for weeks; I have slept in freezing truck cabs, under leaking tentage, on the ground, in a tree, and many times wherever I sat down last...or just didn't sleep at all.  I did all these things in peacetime;  this doesn't even cover the things we endured in combat zones.  I did it all because I believed in it;  still do.  

I am not scribbling (well, cyber-scribble) this as a plea for your thanks.  My thanks come to me when I watch free elections, even with all their shenanigans, taking place and the smooth transistion of power from one group to another...without gunfire or carbombs.  I get it when I see all the beauties of this great nation and its people as they go about their daily FREE lives.  I feel it late at night when I hear "Taps" blowing over at Fort Carson.  I love what I see.  I love this country and I love its people, even the ones I hate.  And that is thanks enough for me.  So why am I writing it?  I want you to think about what you are saying when you say, "Thank a vet".  You should know what they do for you.  You should understand that their lives are at risk daily (did you know, for example, that during the first Gulf War, the Army actually came in under the actuaries?  If a 500,000 man force had been on a peacetime maneuver, they would expect to lose more than were killed in that war!)  At peace or war, they stand between you and the "ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night".  So thank a vet...and know why;  they deserve it.