Happy Veteran's Day!

Operation Write Home makes handmade cards to send to deployed heroes, so they can in turn write home to their families. It's one small way we can serve them as they serve us - and by the notes they write back to us, they love writing on them as much as we enjoy making them!  They are having a blog hop today (blog candy alert) and are being sponsored by some BIG names in the papercrafting industry.  Go and check them out here:

http://www.owhstarsandstamps.org/2011/11/111111-veterans-day-bloghop.html

And as many of you know, my husband, Sterling, is a Vietnam veteran.  While he doesn't like to talk much about what happened there, I do know that he walked point and was a helicopter gunman.  He and his crew were shot out of the sky by enemy soldiers where he suffered blindness for two weeks and other injuries.  They awarded him the purple heart, but he says so many others deserved it more than him.  I feel fortunate and proud to call this humble man is my husband.

Somewhere in the world today, an American soldier will ring in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day with gunfire. Another will arrive home after an honorable tour of duty, perhaps passing brothers and sisters in arms saying farewell to their families. A mother’s tears will fall on a letter from the far side of the world. Old veterans will spend a beautiful afternoon watching children play beneath the flag they raised at Anzio, Guadalcanal, Incheon, or Khe Sanh. Young veterans will put their lives on the line, to give the children of Iraq and Afghanistan a chance at a future free from murderous evil. A little girl will playfully salute a uniform she will one day grow up to wear. A pilot will land a machine that was impossible in his grandfather’s day on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier. The USS New York will ride at anchor, close to the site of the fallen buildings whose bones became her steel.

The veterans of the United States military have always been there for us, in the desperate eleventh hour of our need.

Be there for them.