VETERANS DAY: Lunch crowd reminded, 'We're a nation at war'
Four years ago, retired Army Spc. Michael Hamm was riding in a Humvee south of Baghdad when a 500-pound bomb detonated beneath it.
The former Fort Carson GI went through 30 surgeries that reconnected his broken body using bolts and rods. The two-tour Iraq veteran spent long months in rehabilitation clinics at Walter Reed Army Medical.
On Wednesday, he was lunching on chicken at The Broadmoor in an audience of 600 who gathered to honor local veterans.
He said he was thinking about the veterans of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment who didn’t survive to make the lunch, including two men who perished in the bombing that nearly claimed his life.
But he said he saw Wednesday that he lives in a town where service and sacrifice aren’t allowed to pass unnoticed.
“It reminds you that what you’ve done is valued,” he said.
The lunch marked the end of the three-day Homeland Defense Symposium, where repeated speakers urged attendees to remain vigilant to threats that still haunt America eight years after the 9/11 attacks.
The worry, speakers said, is that Americans have been allowed to forget that they’re living in wartime.
“While we’re a nation at war, the only ones who really feel it, experience it and participate in it are our veterans,” retired Air Force Gen. Richard Myers told the luncheon crowd.
Myers was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top general during the first years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He lauded veterans past and present, but clearly has a special affection for the men and women who went to war under his watch.
He said they face an enemy that exists in shadows amid a mission that requires them to be warriors and peacemakers.
“Our veterans today have much a different challenge than previous groups of veterans have had,” he said.
On projection screens around the banquet hall, a saying appeared in tall letters.
“A veteran ... is someone who at one point in his life wrote a blank check made payable to the United States of America for an amount of ‘up to and including my life.’”
“I agree with that completely,” Hamm said. “It gives me goose bumps.”
