A Lighter View
Honor for veterans
By K.E.H. Stagg

Nov. 12, 2009

Looking at the Veteran’s Day specials advertised in Dillsburg and its surrounds—a free appetizer or free car wash for persons wearing uniforms or showing military photo identification cards—makes me grateful I didn’t sign on the dotted line with delusions of gratitude. I mean, c’mon, people! You can get a free meal for purchasing 10 at regular price. It seems to me that getting shot at, bombed and otherwise endangered deserves more than that!

Business owners may not be able to hand out freebies, but if the rest of us are so self-absorbed that we can offer our veterans nothing more than the dessert that all of us get free on our birthdays, there’s something seriously wrong with us.

Having lived in icky places when I wasn’t threatened with imminent bodily injury, I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to live there under constant threat of annihilation. Frankly, after the first Gulf War, nobody enlisting in the military expected to have a “cake” job in repaying education costs, and yet the draft never needed to be implemented in order to meet staffing requirements. Pretty amazing when you think of it! It means that thousands of men and women voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, knowing they might never make it home.

To be honest, it’s not surprising that the occasional active duty personnel goes barmy. The wonder is that they don’t all turn into whack jobs. If pressed into service, I have to admit I’d probably be the first nutter in my unit.

And we can all be grateful our national defense isn’t up to me, or people like me. While I whole-heartedly support the notion of defense, I doubt I could summon the backbone or the nerves to do what that requires. If we were relying on me, Dillsburg would eventually become a suburb of Azerbaijan, San Marco or pretty much anybody else in the entire world willing to take shots at us.

For those still struggling to make sense of a world that appears to have gone on unchanged, while your own was turned upside-down, I pray that you manage to take one day at a time, one step at a time, back to stability. You have survived brutal scarring, some of it visible but most of it internal. We may seem unobservant or ungrateful, but take it from one too often guilty of silence: your sacrifices have not gone unnoticed or unappreciated.

To all of you who have found or developed the fortitude to use ultimate force, thereby ensuring that the rest of us never have to, thank you from the bottom of my heart!