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The next time you're at the mall, a ball game, or some other venue of public proliferation, take a moment, look at the people around you. Chances are, that guy or gal sitting next to you, or that person just over there, is an American Veteran. Perhaps you yourself have experienced the distinction of service with honor. Unfortunately, some veterans made a greater sacrifice than others who have served and were physically and or mentally damaged by the experience. All Americans, whether veterans or not, owe those who have made such sacrifice a special debt of gratitude.

Some who served of course, never made it to veteran status, they making the supreme sacrifice for country and kin. The other day I was visiting my mothers grave at the cemetery, she was a veteran of WWII, serving as a nurse in the RCAF. While there, I took time to rove up and down between the grave markers, paying particular attention to those announcing that there occupants had distinguished themselves with military service. I was struck by the notion their service was reflective of an episode so remarkable in their life time, as to be the one distinction carved in epitaph on the stone forever marking their existence. Certainly, some of these veterans went on in life to accomplish much greater feats of worthy notation, but in their final refrain, simply their status as veteran, the highest rank they attained during their service and the names of campaigns associated with their duty, was all that would be etched in tribute on their monument.

As I perused through this resting place, where people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds lie side by side in a status of equality and serene contentment, I came to the marker of another comrade who had achieved veteran status, with the distinction of being wounded in battle. I new this, because someone, most likely a family member, had bothered to lay his campaign ribbons atop his marker, and among them was a purple heart. As I stood on this hallowed ground, I felt a knot growing in my throat, and tears welling up in my eyes. I knew somehow, that this specimen of humanity, like so many others damaged in the course of dutiful performance, likely spent each day of the rest of his life with some small painful inference reminding him of his personal sacrifice, incurred many years prior on some forgotten foreign battlefield. That is, forgotten to anyone who was not their to share the experience.

After my own tour of duty was completed, as was the case with most

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