Thank a veteran--and run!

Today being Veterans Day I thought I would try thanking the veterans I know. At work I had a chance to thank the new guy who I overheard was in the military recently. He seemed genuinely surprised and pleased, and said I was the first person to remember today.

After work my wife told me she had made a cake to take to someone. She had gone to our kids' school for their Veterans Day program, and the principal had given her the idea to find a veteran to show thanks to. Our older son has a friend whose dad served recently in Iraq and has now retired into the National Guard and local law enforcement. We decided to take the cake to him as a family.

He wasn't home when we showed up at his house, but his wife was very grateful. She called him at work and told him about it, and he called our house and left a message on our answering machine before we could even get home. He seemed very astonished and grateful that someone would do that for him and his family.

So I've come to the conclusion that it's hard to thank a vet and not come away feeling like you got more gratitude back than you gave. Next year I may have to try random, drive-by thankings. Take that!

Lest We Forget

Sippican Cottage has a post about his father, a WWII veteran, and his visit to see on of the few remaining B-24 bombers in which he flew 40 missions as ball-turret gunner.

My father was a ball gunner on a B-24J Liberator bomber in the Pacific during WW2. He rarely spoke about that. My father and his confreres considered themselves part of a thing greater than the sum of their parts in it --or so it seems to me -- and more or less did what was expected of them as a sort of unpleasant chore, kept themselves safe as much as was practicable, amused themselves when possible, and got back to being regular people as soon as they could.

The Greatest Generation is rapidly disappearing. We will have lost something irreplaceable when they're gone. The represent something nearly gone from our nation, something we will miss dearly once we realize what we've lost.