To me Veterans Day like Memorial Day is a very solemn celebration. I thought that I was over this, but I'm not.

Let me take you back to 1970. I was working at Zama hospital in Japan. I'd been transferred there from Madigan Army Medical Center on what was then called a levy. Groups of soldiers from various commands meeting a particular criterion were selected for a particular assignment. The Army was looking for personnel, particularly medics, who had not yet had an overseas assignment and I was one of very few of my rank who had not been overseas. I was sent to the Zama, Japan, to work as a nurse there. A couple years before I arrived, the hospital had been expanded from a dispensary in response to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam.  So from the time of my arrival in August 1970 until the following January, staffing was so thin that we were working 12 hours a day seven days a week. During that time I was working as the second shift charge nurse on a ward dedicated to head and neck surgery. One of the patients on my ward had been transferred from the psychiatric ward. He became unruly sometime after midnight and I attempted to call for the assistance of the nursing supervisor we affectionately referred to as the "ramp tramp." During that call I was hit several times on the left side of my head. Luckily the "ramp trmp" heard the commotion over the phone and came running to the ward. Because I'd been hit with, as it was discovered later, the receiver of the phone, a skull series was done which was followed by a brain scan. The tentative diagnosis put me on the medevac flight to the states. And in doing that, I left my many friends and fellow workers, my buddies, at Zama hospital.

I think that many who have been in the military will tell you that they do what they do not out of patriotic fervor, but for their buddies. So now I was leaving mine behind. I'd already lost one of my friends, who I had gone to school with in San Antonio, to the war in Vietnam. Now I was leaving a whole group of buddies behind. What followed and found me in the stateside hospital I had been admitted to were stories of a wholesale transfer of medics from Japan to Vietnam. Those stories were followed by others about the death and mutilation of my buddies while they were in Vietnam. Simply stated I felt guilty. I had abandoned them. So it is that now I can't watch Veterans Day or Memorial Day celebrations without a great amount of emotion.

I served, but please don't shake my hand. Soldiers don't like war, but they will defend their buddies to ensure that war does not find their doorstep.

There must be a better word than "solemn."