“A veteran – whether active duty, retired, or national guard or reserve – is someone who, at one point in their life, wrote a blank check made payable to “The United States of America,” for an amount of “up to and including THEIR LIFE.”
Author: ~Unknown Author
This week our nation will pause to say thank you to those men and women. And I, for one, am going to get a little bit teary eyed about it all, because for the past four years, I was a West Point Mom, and this year, for the first time, I am an Army Mom.
My son graduated from college this past May. Not just any college, mind you. Nope. The boy bleeds red, white and blue and it was always his dream to attend The United States Military Academy at West Point. After a million application and nomination forms, a billion letters of rec and various medical and fitness tests, that is just what he did. So when I told people that my son was in college, that’s not the whole story: my son was a Cadet at West Point. His dorm was a barracks. His campus was a post. He wore uniforms to class and had to get a pass to come home. Every summer he was away at different military training assignments. Proud? You bet your Bald Eagle I was.
So that was my path to official Army mom-ness. But in the end, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Because if you are related to a member of our nation’s armed forces, you go through all sorts of the same emotions as all the other military families out there. You are proud and happy and excited and at times, very, very scared. Because if you learn nothing from watching and reading the news, you learn that the above quote about the blank check your loved one has written is brutally true.
I have visited and toured historic battlefields, both here in the US and abroad. 
And I am eternally grateful for and mindful of the sacrifices it took to get where we are today. But these days I am seeing it all differently. Now it is my child who will be fighting for the future of our nation and the safety of our world. It is an overwhelming emotion when you realize that that boy has decided that his duty to his country is more important than anything else he could have done after college.
So I’m looking at Veteran’s Day with a new set of eyes this year. Because I live firsthand with the goodbyes and the missed holidays and birthdays. I am now living with the knowledge that my Lieutenant will be spending a good number of his days in harm’s way. And I realize what all those other families, for the past 200+ years, have gone through when they sent their loved ones off to serve.
You may not agree with all the politics swirling around our nation these days. But I’d like you to forget all that, and when you see a member of our military, or pass by a memorial to those who paid up on that blank check, or see an elderly veteran in the store, realize that they are or were motived by something so much more than politics and current events. They are motivated by their love of our country and the desire to serve this nation, and those of us that live here.
Thank them. Then thank them again.
