Remembering: Veterans' Day, November 11, 2010

What do we owe soldiers on the battlefields of the present
or - do not doubt it - the future?
How does one honor the inexpressibly difficult decision
 to walk toward annihilation,
in some instances guaranteed,
for the sake of the imperfect strategies of war,
their confused execution,
and their uncertain result?
What can we offer the soldiers who will not know
 the outcome of their struggle,
or ever again see those left behind?

Mark Helprin
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Afghanistan, 2010
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Remember the family of James Clifford McKittrick.

They are still waiting for him to come home.

I'm still waiting to send them my POW-MIA bracelet.

Remember Barry Lynn Brown.

 I escorted his flag-draped coffin home to his family.
Captain Barry Lynn Brown, Killed in Action, Vietnam, May 5, 1968

Remember Joseph Ambrose,

 a World War I veteran, holding the flag that covered the casket of his son,

who had been killed in the Korean War.