“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” – Winston Churchill, WWII
Answering their country’s call to duty, our warriors have been sent all over the world to defeat those who wanted to take from us our freedoms and our tangible riches. Our warriors all came back – some only in spirit, their bodies left on foreign soil, some physically but wounded either in body, mind, or spirit. We honor and remember their service by setting aside special days: Memorial Day, 4th of July, Veterans Day and erecting monuments. But so many of us, when the parades and speeches are over, go home and forget our warriors until the next “round” of parades and speeches, or heaven forbid, war.
But it is our veterans, 24.9 million of them, who live every day with the aftermath inflected by horrors of their war. A grateful government cannot possibly administer adequately to all of the every day and special needs of these warriors. And so, many private organizations have been formed to help supply these needs, some by the veterans themselves. A movement has been started to create an American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial in Washington, D.C. If you value the service rendered for you by these veterans, you might want to visit some of these websites:
- American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial: www.avdlm.org
- Veterans of Foreign Wars: www.vfw.org. The VFW’s Buddy Poppy program provides employment for disabled vets.
- Disabled American Vets: www.dav.org
- www.freedomisnotfree.com
- www.help4vets.org
- Strummings for Vets provides music therapy: www.strummingforvets.org
- www.woundedwarriorproject.org
A simple browser search will also identify other sites dedicated to the veterans, including ones containing poetry.
The final service we can do for our fallen soldiers is bury them, giving them forever to a merciful Higher Power. In addition to the military cemeteries on American soil, the United States through the American Battle Monuments Commission maintains 24 cemeteries in 10 foreign countries. These cemeteries are places of interment for our warriors who fell on those foreign grounds. Most are found near former battlefield sites and our military bases throughout the world on land given in perpetuity by host nations. Visit the Commission’s website at www.abmc.gov to find information about these cemeteries, obtain assistance with planning a trip to one of these cemeteries and/or memorials, find information about any service personnel buried or honored at a specific cemetery, obtain assistance in finding lodging/travel information and for obtaining a fee-free passport for family members so they can visit a grave.
(Information for this posting was found: (1) via an Internet search which rendered the websites set out in it, (2) the Sunday edition, November 7, 2010, of the Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas.)
