I have some angst about Veterans Day. It’s the same midwestern angst I have about being too excited about anything. I don’t like the feeling that I am not differentiated from my religion, my faith, my job, and my country, politics etc… I have an aspirational image of myself that I am a little above trappings, pomp and circumstance of the life I lead.

Veteran’s Day is no exception.

I’m fine celabrating the service of others but being a veteran is sometimes a little sureal to me. I’m so used to this life and have more or less forgotten what life was like before putting on the uniform that considering myself in this slice of our population is something of an odd thought. I get up, I go to work, I get paid, I serve people and, oh right, my country.

Maybe it’s this job. Yesterday, I preached in both prison facilities in which I work. In one, I am their chaplain, their pastor – the inmates are all veterans themselves but have been put out of service because of their convictions in courts martial. Ministering to them in humility and being proud of my own service carries no small tension in my mind.

So today, I celebrate a deployment from what seems long ago. Operation Iraqi Freedom III. Camp Striker, Iraq. 2/121 Infantry Battalion (Mechanized). A year that changed me at my core. A young, idealistic, hurting young chaplain met with a nervous, driven Infantry battalion and grew together into a hardened combat team, taking the fight to the enemy.

I think of that year now with no small amount of emotion. Those that died. Those that lived. The wounded, those who continue to be wounded. We were, all of us, changed by that war.