Count the Cost of Freedom

[unhappycamper]

Count the Cost of Freedom
Joe Galloway | November 10, 2009

Veterans Day has come around again, as it does every fall, arriving with a new crispness in the air, the woods painted in glorious color and the days of a year that seemed new just yesterday now dwindled to a precious few.

If none of those signs had signaled its arrival, the advertising of big sales at the malls would have reminded those without more personal and less commercial ties to military service.

In this year, the last living British veteran of World War I died. The last American combat veteran of The Great War died in 2007 at age 108. The last of the Greatest Generation veterans of World War II, who once numbered some 15 million and changed the face of this nation, are slipping away fast now. The veterans of Korea, the forgotten war, are fading away, too. The ranks of more than 3 million who served in the Vietnam War are thinning out, as well.

Our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are contributing a smaller but steady stream of new veterans joining the ranks. Political and military leaders are analyzing and deciding on a future course in Afghanistan that could lock us into years more of combat and many more new veterans.

Military service today, however, is reserved for the few who volunteer, unlike the days of big wars and conscription or the draft, which filled the ranks with millions of young men.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,205600,00.html