As the years go by we should think of the Veterans.   What is a Veteran?
         He's the policeman on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day, while he made sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel.
         He's the legionnaire, riding in the parade, who pins on his ribbons and medals......with a prosthetic hand.
         He is the old guy at the supermarket check-out, palsied and slow, who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and now wishes all day long that his wife was still alive, to hold him when the nightmares come.
         He is an ordinary, yet an extraordinary person who offered some of his vital years to the service of his Country and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice their own.
         He's the man who sells copying machines, who remembers the long hours riding in the nose of a cold bomber (Temperature: 50 degrees below zero), and the time over targets peering through a bomb sight, ignoring the plane ahead of him that is on fire and the sounds of shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells making holes in his plane.
         He's the old man, who as an 18 year old boy, shouldered his barracks bag and walked up the loading ramp of a troop ship, wondering where he was going and what would happen when he got there. He walks slower these days, avoids stairs that make problems for his arthritic joints. He'd never been more than 150 miles from home before, but learned world geography by "visiting" strange places with exotic names like Alamein, or DaNang or St,Lo. He knows about places like Coventry, Dunkirk, or Midway and what happened many years ago at such places.
         But because of him and others like him, we still use the English lanquage, in England and America. We are allowed to select the men and women who will make our laws. We have freedom to come and go as we wish, whenever and wherever we want to go. We have watched small children grow up never knowing what it meant to dash to an air raid shelter when airplanes were flying overhead.
          So maybe when you see someone who has served our countries, who helped preserve the many things you take for granted, you must lean over and say:
                                             "Thank you"