Honoring a Veteran Honoring Veterans...

I always count my blessings on Veteran's Day and look for the right words to honor those that have served and are serving. I found those words in a note from my good friend and veteran Kirk Weisler. I post his words for you to read on this day of honor:

It’s Veteran’s day, and I won’t cheapen it with a feeble effort and some patriotic platitudes. Rather I will attempt to express something from my own experience and from my own heart.

I would like to share with you a personal story of an opportunity I had while serving a 4 year active duty enlistment with the 3rd Ranger Battalion at Ft. Benning Georgia. I also got to serve a short stint with the 10th Mountain Division while at Benning. Part of my service included being assigned to the dreaded “Funeral Detail” Which I was informed would be a mostly boring assignment to honor recently deceased veterans. The funeral detail was a 30 day duty assignment where I would be in charge of the seven man team who did the 21 gun salute, during the funeral services of any active or retired serviceman who passed away within a 2-3 hour driving radius of our post. Also assigned to our detail was a service man to play Taps, and the crew assigned to carry the deceased veterans casket and attend to the folding of the flag from his casket and passing it to the spouse or next of kin.

I cannot think of any other assignment or duty I performed during my enlistment that was as personally rewarding to me as this one. The absolute depth of humility and gratitude I felt for these men, whom I did not know, was surprising to me then as a young and mostly immature soldier. But my knowing them did not seem to be important…knowing that they had sworn to “uphold and protect”, that they had worn the uniform of a soldier, that they had been willing to put their life in harms way for a cause greater than themselves, seemed to be more than enough. I remember clearly the intense feelings that came to myself and my squad each time the sound of Taps reached through our ears to our hearts, each time the shots rang out, and each time our sacred flag was folded with reverence and respect. It seemed during those moments that the soldier we honored that day was some revered national hero, someone whom had single handedly won the day. As if the soldiers we honored at those services somehow represented every soldier who had every fought in or been to battle… the presence or sense that I felt during those sacred moments was if there were literally thousands of soldiers there at that moment, coming to pay their respects, to give reverence and honor to one of their own. On the sometimes long and mostly quite bus rides back to base as I reflected on the feelings of the day…I could easily imagine the deceased whom we had honored being welcomed from this life into the next by the Warriors and Soldiers of yesterday’s battles into a Army of with perhaps a different uniform, maybe a different commanding officer and weapons…but still fighting for the same cause…. A cause of Justice a cause of Mercy, Be-Cause of Freedom.

The fanciful romantic musings of a young Christian soldier?…Maybe so. One thing is for certain though…Funeral Detail was anything but mostly boring and honoring veterans dead or alive is no singular activity. Honoring one is honoring all, honoring all is honoring the one. Today I will find at least one veteran, I will thank him for what they have done, what they were willing to do, what he/she is doing right now and what they may be asked to do tomorrow. My experience on that funeral detail taught me anything it taught me that honoring one….truly can be honoring all…and in honoring them all we miss not a one.

God Bless America and the Soldiers Who’ve Fought for Freedom Kirk Weisler, Former Sgt, 3rd Ranger Bn. , 10th Mtn Division, 19th Special Forces

Hooah and thank you!