How to Salute Our Vets

"John Keegan argues in his History of Warfare that 'All civilizations owe their origins to the warrior.' But more than that, all civilizations owe their continued existence to the warrior. This is especially true of our civilization. We dare not think about it, but the line separating us, protecting us, from another dark age is terrifyingly thin. And those 1.4 million warriors who wear our nation’s uniform stand on that line."

This is Veteran's Day in the U.S.A. An article in FrontPage Magazine, by Alan W. Dowd, is worth reading.

"They seem to do it all," he writes. "First and foremost, they protect and defend us. They overthrow enemy regimes, fighting and dying on snow-capped mountains and in arid deserts, in jungles and cities, on land and sea and in the skies. Along the way, they build hospitals, refurbish schools, serve as de facto diplomats, feed starving kids and rebuild broken nations. They respond to disasters of biblical proportion in places as disparate as Sumatra, Louisiana and Pakistan. They leave limbs on faraway battlefields and come home with nightmares. Yet they have returned, again and again, to the battlefront in order to protect the home front.

"In short, they have done everything we ask of them. And yet they ask for very little in return. So how can we ever repay this generation of veterans? I don’t have all the answers to that weighty question, but I have some ideas.

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