Growing up as a kid of the Fifties, everybody had dads, uncles, grandpas, even brothers, who were veterans. Less obvious were the holes in old family photos, the ones who didn’t make it back from World War II, Korea, or Viet Nam.

I’m an old soldier myself now. When I first looked around in the Seventies, I thought it incongruous that my contemporaries, the Viet Nam Era veterans, would fit in with the then-aging guys from WW II or Korea. Now most of those old guys are gone and MY group are the greybeards

I lost friends in Viet Nam. Hell, even worse, I lost friends in the Cold War. A soldier killed when his M-88 recovery vehicle rolled and caught fire in Hohenfels, Germany is no less dead than one of my friends who died amid fire and steel in Viet Nam.

Today, THIS day, is about them, the guys we lived with and laughed with back in those mist-hidden years, the guys who remain forever young in our memories, who died while serving.