Veterans march into history.



















In a single day in Washington, D.C., you can visit the Marine Corps Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

But Monday is not Memorial Day, when we honor the dead. It is Veterans Day, when we remember the living.

We are still creating combat veterans every day in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. The veterans of the Persian Gulf war are graying. The teenagers who fought in Vietnam are retiring. The Korean War veterans are getting elderly (though don't dare tell them that to their face) and the median age of a World War II veteran is 93.

Find them and hear their stories.

There will be time in the future to visit Bastogne and Iwo Jima, Pusan and Inchon, Da Nang and Khe Sanh, Kuwait City and maybe someday, even Baghdad and Kandahar.

Marble, bronze and granite memorials withstand time. Hearts, hands and memories of those they honor will not.

Veterans are not a movie or a video game or a statue or a presidential proclamation. They are our neighbors and schoolmates, and for some our husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

They left home and took a trip that was not a vacation but was a journey. Some went willingly and eagerly. Some were drafted or believed they had few alternatives. Their feelings about what they saw and did are as varied as humanity.

In 1994, I walked Omaha Beach in Normandy with Walt Ehlers of Buena Park, the former Kansas farmboy who landed on D-Day along with his older brother, Roland. A German mortar round landed in Roland's landing craft, killing him before he could get to the beach. Walt would go on to fight his way across France, receiving the Medal of Honor for bravery in combat.

Watching families fly kites and kick soccer balls around the beach, the hulking shell-pocked wrecks of Nazi bunkers on the bluff above, Ehlers said all the sacrifice had been worth it. Hitler was pure evil and he had to be stopped. Still, Ehlers would gladly exchange all the medals for the life of his brother. He was proudest not of the killing he had done for his country but the lives he had saved on one of the bloodiest days of combat in American history.

“I didn't lose one of the 12 guys in my squad on D-Day,” Ehlers said. “They all made it to the top.”

From veterans across years and across wars, I heard one story that united them all: coming home.

A quarter-century ago, I asked Erving Dresser what is was like to come back in uniform to Bristol, Conn., where his family lived at the time.

A smile drew across his deeply creased face as he was transported back 70 years.

“I can still remember walking up my street and here's my mother running down the road to meet me,” Dresser said. “I can still feel her arms wrapped around me.”

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