This Veteran's Day, I thumbed idly through the school's newspaper as I sat outside waiting for the class preceding mine to end. The breeze rustled the pages and the tree above me. I closed my eyes, sat back, and took a deep breath, welcoming the hint of winter's edge after the unusually hot summer. Upon opening my eyes, I glanced around the empty courtyard. Since this classroom was adjacent to the campus ROTC offices, Army paraphernalia peppered the walls and windows of the surrounding buildings. My glance came to rest on a small monument: a boulder with an MIA/POW plaque stuck to it. I'd seen it many times before and never paid much attention to it, thinking it rather cheap-looking, but that day it struck a minor chord within me. The breeze blew the grass gently around it as I read the words inscribed. "To those who gave their all: You will never be forgotten."

To those who gave their all. From those who suffered bleeding feet and severe cold at Valley Forge, to those who suffered poison gas in the horrible, horrible trenches of the War to End All Wars, to the ones tortured in German prison camps in the war that followed. Those ones who may still be alive somewhere in Vietnam, about whom we shall never be certain. Those who served in the wars no one bothers remembering any more, the French and Indian and the Spanish-American Wars. Those who died at the hands of their kinsman in the inappropriately, unfortunately glamorized Civil War. Hundreds of stories about hundreds of thousands of brave men and women still untold, never to be known.

Those who survived seem all too often to be overshadowed by their fallen comrades. Yet they, too, have given much: missing their children's childhood; losing hands and legs and eyes; living in pain; never being able to escape the mental torment of seeing the blood and the innards of a fallen man spattered on the cold ground or of inflicting death. These are worthy of remembrance and thanks, perhaps even more so than those who have passed on.

I sat there, staring at the plaque with the soft grasses blowing over it, wondering what happened to those prisoners of war and those men missing in action and, if some were still alive, where they might be and if they still thought of their homeland. War seems so far away; so surreal. And then suddenly it is close beside you, grasping your heart with its realness and twisting your soul with its price.

The other class started issuing out of the doors, chattering noisily. I shook my head and glanced down at the paper, still in my hands. An advertisement for the ROTC took up a half-page. It showed a young man in camouflage climbing a rope with the text, "Prerequisite: Guts" printed above. I stared at the picture for a few seconds before looking back at the plaque, now surrounded by students hurrying on their way. I wondered how many of them, so preoccupied with their cell phones and gossip, had ever really thought about how good their lives were and why they were able to live they way they did. I wondered how many had even remembered that today was Veteran's Day, and how many had stopped to think about those who had sacrificed everything for them. Not nearly enough by any standard, of that I was certain. Guts, indeed, are essential. Guts not only to face destruction of that most precious resource, life; but guts know that sacrifice will be belittled and hidden, and then to stand ready to give the sacrifice anyway.

To those who gave their all, and to those who gave more: Thank you. You are not forgotten. America itself bears testimony of you.