John 15:13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

My Father served on swiftboats in Vietnam. He was a shipfitter on the USS Haverfield - a Destroyer Escort named after a Naval Officer killed on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. My father's father was on the USS Helena that morning - parked diagonally but across from the Arizona and saw her blow that morning as he was topside manning an anti-aircraft gun. At any rate, Grandfather was a very highly decorated hero of the war having seen some very heavy action on the USS Helena - a very highly decorated ship until she went down her last night inflicting some serious damage on the Japanese before she went down due to being out in a night engagement and lacking flashless powder she made a perfect target on a moonless night. Grandpa spent a few days in the water and was lucky to have survived. He even survived staying at his post in a previous engagement where he was the lone survivor on his gun mount topside and while it burned he manned it himself and received second and third degree burns on his face - refusing to quit until the engagement was over - and again having contributed to inflicting some heavy damage on the Japanese.

My other grandfather, an Italian immigrant had fought in the trenches in World War I and nearly had his leg taken off by a landmine during one of the assaults over the top into the German lines - where he was sent to a french hospital and met my grandmother at the hospital while she was working - he was 34 and she was 17.....and the rest of that tale tells its self.

Father, being a ship's engineer - like yours truly - was a welder and could weld aluminum. Well - the swift boats would come out to sea and tie up to the destroyer escorts if they had finished an engagement and had dead or wounded and needed repairs before they headed back up river or if they couldn't make it to base. So - sometimes they were short handed or needed another engineer to help patch them up and extra gunners on their runs - so dad volunteered - and that was how he ended up on swiftboats.

He headed up river many miles to cross a line the US never went across to pick up Marine recon. Father volunteered to go ashore to pick up the recon and check out the village. He found the Marines had been captured - tortured, mutilated, killed including their genitals cut off and everyone in the village also killed, raped and mutilated by the Viet Cong.

As he looked in horror at the depravity of humanity and it dawned on him the mission was a failure....and he was in danger - he was captured in the ambush. Two of them grabbed him and put a knife to his fingers to cut them off in order to get his wedding ring when he pulled it off and threw it at them - they took his Saint Christopher's medal from around his neck and started pummeling him in the face while two VC held him by the arms so he couldn't fight back. Then they strung him up to shoot him in the back when the men on the boat opened fire. Unable to see off the boat into the jungle, one of the men lobbed a grenade - as the VC strung my father up with his flak jacket still on and shot him in the back, the grenade went off blowing him, he estimates, fifty feet in the air. He said he remembered falling and the impact of the bullet caught the edge of his flak jacket but didn't otherwise wound him other than spinning him in addition to being hit by a grenade blast.

Legs not working he found his rifle and pulled himself back to the boat with his arms - the boat had opened so much fire they were sawing the trees in half when the VC launched rockets with cables across the river and blocked the river with bamboo log booms so the boat couldn't get back down river and out to sea. They were trapped.

Calling for air support they ran figure eights in the river opening fire waiting for the inevitable that they would all be killed and those who weren't would be captured and suffer the same fate as the marines.

Recovering from the stun and able to move on the boat, that day there were eight of them on board. One was shot and father stood up to help move him down off the rail where he wouldn't be a target and nearly was killed himself in moving the other sailor down off the main deck when others were killed. He recalled the blood cooking on the deck in the Cambodian sun while the remaining sailors opened fire as he tended to moving the wounded off the deck with the hot ammunition casings spilling down on him and into his flak jacket while they were screaming to be fed more ammunition.

It was only a matter of time until they were all killed with nowhere to go while radioing frantically and begging for an air strike for help to get them out of there. After what seemed like an eternity some F-5's came in with some rockets and were able to blow up one of the bamboo log booms and they were able to run through the breach and head out to sea. Out of eight - five killed two wounded.

I didn't get it so long ago when he played this song for me as a child. I heard it again the other day and it suddenly meant something special to me. In an era when politicians double talk the the media is the king of spin - those in the military have a mission and they go and they accomplish it. They get in, get the job done, and get home.

Men who mean - just what they say.

I didn't know this song came out in 1966 and in the middle of the Vietnam war it turned into a pop hit - written and sung by an Army medic who was wounded in the war.

At any rate, military service isn't glamorous. I know because I was there. The movies add music and the glamor shots. It's largely a thankless job where you drive yourself and its up to you with those you serve with to be true to what you believe in and go serve faithfully. And some....don't come home.

But in this life where we risk all for life and freedom - dying in the line of duty is nothing. To those who say we shouldn't be in Iraq - we have liberated an oppressed people who have never known freedom. That alone is worth it. They experienced the same things that I saw, the wretched masses of oppressed humanity and my father saw and his father fought against - torture, mutilations, raping and killings at the hands of a "government." Spreading freedom in this world.......you don't know how valuable it is until you've seen what it's like without it.

So in a tribute to all my fellow veterans and those yet to come, and in remembrance of my family going back to the American Revolution - while this is the "Ballad of the Green Berets" - I know the values in it are held by all those who faithfully serve.

Happy veterans day. You don't have to thank a veteran - if they are like me they don't know what to do with it when they get it - if you do it to one of the older veterans - they may look surprised - many of us wear our service hats on this day - or many more may wear a poppy - you can make a donation to one of the military foundations or fly the American flag this day but don't ever ever forget - because what horrors go on in this world are often experienced by and fought against by those who VOLUNTEER. And many....don't come back. But if you think about it - if it wasn't for America there wouldn't be much freedom left in the world.....God Bless America and her Allies and God Bless our Veterans.