Letter: I May Not Still Look like a Navy Officer but I’m Still a Veteran

I am proud to say that I am a veteran and I have many friends who are veterans. You know us, you see us every day but you may not recognize the veteran that lives inside each of us.

Oh, I’m sure you will recognize the younger veterans of the two wars that we have been engaged in for more than a decade. They are much easier to spot since many of them are missing parts of their bodies lost to the ubiquitous “Improvised Explosive Device”—the IED.

Often hidden is something as innocent as a child’s stuffed toy or a pile of trash lying along the road, this simple tool, so loved by our enemies, has claimed countless lives and has wrought what we euphemistically call “life altering injuries” on thousands of our young veterans.

But for many of us, our enemy has been time. My wife Carrie and I were shopping at the Marine Corps Exchange at Quantico not too long ago. We had stopped to have lunch in the food court and as we sat there, I watched the young, straight, strong Marines with “high and tight” haircuts come into the exchange.

Then a young Marine held the door open for an elderly man who came through the door with a walker and headed over to the motorized shopping carts. As I watched him, I remarked to my wife, “You know, thirty years or more ago, that old man looked just like those young Marines.” And it suddenly dawned on me that I did, too.

Just a little more than 45 years ago, I came to Quantico to attend the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. I was a 35-year-old lieutenant commander in the Navy Medical Service Corps who had already spent several years serving alongside Marines. While I never attempted to “out Marine a Marine”, I was tall and trim, wore my hair short and I made sure my uniform was always squared away.

Now, when I look in the mirror, I can’t find that young Navy officer. I see an old guy with almost white hair and a face full of wrinkles looking back at me. If I step on the scales, I groan at my weight and my belt tells me my girth is several inches more than that of the young Navy officer of four and a half decades ago. But, I am still a veteran.

This year marks the 62nd anniversary of my enlistment in the United States Navy. “Sixty-two years”, I occasionally remind myself, “where did they go?” Well, they went many places—places like Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Republic of the Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Venezuela and countless other places.

In one or two of those places we weren’t very welcome and in others we were greeted as friends. In some of those places young men bled and died and many came home with injuries that continue to plague them to this day—injuries of the body and the mind. But they all share one thing—they are veterans. They are a part of that long line of men and women who have served our nation from its very beginning. Each generation has stood on the shoulders of the previous generation and has gone off to wars they sometimes did not understand. But they went and some came home and some did not.

And so today, the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the year 2013, perhaps pause at the eleventh hour as they did ninety-five years ago when all was quiet on the Western Front. Take of few minutes to remember our veterans and to thank them for this Nation and the freedom we enjoy. God bless you, God bless our veterans and God bless America.

-George Harris
Prince William County

*Editors note: This letter was received on the evening of Nov. 11, 2013.