An Open Letter to American Soldiers
Dear American Soldier:
Thank you. Do you ever hear those words? We Americans tend to take so much for granted as we go about our daily lives. We sleep in warm, cozy beds and wake to the sound of an alarm telling us how much time we have to ready ourselves for the day.
We kiss our children awake, feed them a hearty breakfast, and then drive them to a school, secure in the knowledge that they are safe and are learning well. We grumble our way through traffic on well-paved roads to our jobs, often looking forward more to the weekend than to performing a good day's work.
We attend our children's ballgames, concerts, piano and dance recitals, and parent-teacher conferences, feeling "stressed" with this rat race we call life.
Of an evening, we collapse into our Lazy-Boy recliners with remote in hand, flipping mindlessly through endless channels, often dozing through the nightly news which provides fewer and fewer updates on the current situations overseas, focusing instead on the more local wars of politics and crime. Days can pass without so much as a passing thought about war activities outside our immediate concern.
We continue to live our mundane lives because of you and soldiers like you who make that freedom possible. You struggle through the heat and dust, weighted down by the added pounds of equipment and of fear, knowing that the next mile or your next step could put you in harm's way. You fight as clean a fight as you can, striving to protect civilians in other lands without knowing which of those civilians are fighting against you. You may go days without sleep, and even when you do sleep, it is a restless one, filled with the noises of war and the involuntary jerks and nightmares that awaken you. You dream of home and you savor every word of every letter that you receive, which are far too few.
And you do all of this out of love for your family and your country. You do this to protect the very freedoms that we continue to enjoy each day. You do this with courage unparalleled.
As we celebrate Veterans Day here at home, it is you and those like you whom we honor. It is your heroism and your willingness and commitment to do what we cannot that we commend.
It is our prayer that you are safe as you read these words and that you will return safely to your family who thinks about you every minute of every day. Be protected with the armor of God as you serve this country, and know in your heart, that what you are doing for humanity is the right thing. Godspeed on your return, and thank you from America.
Sandy Foster
