To All Veterans: Thank You For Your Service and Courage

Veterans Day 11.11.11

I wish to honor and humbly thank all our veterans, past, present and future, for their sacrifice, courage and service in the United States Armed Forces, securing freedom and justice for all.

I find it fitting to publish my eleventh post in my Thirty Days of Thankfulness series at exactly the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the twenty-first century also known as Veterans Day. As noted in an excellent post by a fellow blogger (ProSe), in less than three years we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, misnamed 'the War to End All Wars.' If you ever get a chance to visit the Liberty Memorial, a memorial to the fallen soldiers of WWI, in Kansas City, Missouri, I highly recommend you make a visit to the National World War I museum housed beneath the memorial. Our modern day Veterans Day grew out of Armistice Day which commemorated the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany, ending World War I, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

That Special Veteran in My Life

Ron promoted to Colonel during Desert Storm

I am especially thankful for my uncle and his service in the United States Air Force. Thanks to his various deployments around the United States (and the world), I got to see most of the lower forty-eight states before I turned sixteen. Nearly all our family vacations ventured to various Air Force bases in Montana, Arizona, Florida, Virginia and Colorado. I remember when he was deployed to Thailand during the Vietnam War. I caught pneumonia when we visited Ron in Panama City, Florida, because it actually snowed in Florida that year and was warmer back in Kansas and my mom didn't think we would need any heavy winter clothes. I also remember corresponding electronically with him while at college in 1984 via the university's Digital Equipment Corporation VAX while he was deployed to Aviano, Italy, years before most of the world even dreamed about the Internet or e-mail or instant messaging or text messaging. I received Christmas cards from all over the world, including Saudi Arabia before the first Gulf War. I worried about him then and during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. I attended his retirement celebration held at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Even though Ron wasn't a pilot, I grew up wanting to be a jet fighter pilot or an astronaut. I didn't find out until my teens that women weren't allowed to do the former (because it involved combat) and the latter involved way more science than I wanted to tackle then, although the math would have appealed.

For the last dozen years, Ron has enjoyed his retirement as a watercolor artist, a writer and a grandfather to five grand children with a sixth on the way (two girls and twin boys recently born to his son Wendell and his wife Kristin; as well as a girl from his son Eric and his wife Cayla, who is expecting their second child early next year). When he's not painting or writing or bouncing grandchildren on his knee, he reads much more than I do. We discuss and debate shared reads and flip books each other's way either by media mail postal rate or electronically via our Nook Colors. When we actually get together for a family visit, I love to hear his stories about his father Ralph's service during WWII and after as well as his own adventures around the world.

Yesterday, in his daily e-mail to family and friends, he remembered how much tougher military personnel have it today than when he was on active duty. Ron did two years of nastiness (amid eleven years of overseas duty) out of his thirty year military career. Soldiers today will spend half of their enlistment or career getting shot at.

Thank You Veterans!