by Jennifer West

Created on: November 17, 2009

Understanding Why Veterans Day is Important.

Throughout the past century America has been involved in many wars, from World War I to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Men and eventually women served faithfully in each of these wars. From the airman to the seaman, to the ground pounding soldier. From the volunteer nurses to the enlisted doctors and female pilots. Some faithful servants of the Department of Defense carry on family legacies of enlisting in one service to another, from generation to generation and into the next. Others are the first in their families to join the defense fighters of America.

Serving faithfully and without question as to the orders they are given when it is time to pack his or her bags and move into position to fight. Some fight in more then one war and have seen what the ultimate sacrifice looks like when a brother in arms dies in combat. A member of the armed services can never forget the horrors that go along with being in combat. These horrors sometimes amount to lasting negative effects on a person psychologically eventually taking a hard tole on a persons physical body.

A war hero who was once young, carefree and naive, new to the world goes across the sea and comes back a hardened man or women with a view of the world that not many can comprehend. He returns home to try to assume the role within the family that he had prior to leaving. Making efforts to try to be the same person, doing the same things, in the same way that he did before he left. But the sameness of his life as it were before can not be found in the life he has after returning from war.

He is left with either a lifetime of a hardened disposition or a lifetime of making efforts to overcoming a hardened disposition. The results, Americans with continued freedom, politicians with agendas to accomplish and depending on the war, other countries with freedoms and liberties for citizens granted within their own governmental bodies. As a product of our political beliefs we Americans hold, we whole heartedly refuse to forget the conditions at which we place on our military heros for months and sometimes years at a time intermittently or constantly. We refuse to forget the life that continues after war as well as the ripple effects that spread outward from that single person, showing that each soldier's life has meaning within in the heart of those who choose to celebrate Veterans Day.

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