Today isn’t about saving an additional 10% on shoes at the mall.

Today is for all those who stood ready to charge across the last few hundred yards of enemy territory, under fire, to carry forward our country’s ideals and values.

It’s a day I honor all veterans, but especially those who stood beside me in battle.

Happy Veterans Day 2013.

Available in print and as an ebook from Amazon.com and Tactical16.com. Available electronically from iTunes/iBooks and Barnesandnoble.com.

I experienced something recently that I have to talk about. I’m pissed off about this and need to get it out now, while it’s still fresh.

Monday November 12th my wife and I went to a couple of restaurants that were offering free meals to veterans. Despite the fact that I’m a trillionaire author, our four kids and single income means my family doesn’t have a lot of extra money to throw around. So this year we decided to go to the Olive Garden and Golden Corral.

The experience at the Olive Garden was excellent. The restaurant wasn’t any more packed than normal when we arrived for lunch. When I asked the waitress about the Veterans Day meal, she very politely asked me for my ID (the Olive Garden requires proof of military service) and then told me her boyfriend is an Army reservist preparing for an Afghanistan deployment. The service was excellent, the food was great, a handful of veterans wearing military hats or shirts shared quiet meals with their families at other tables. It was an all around good experience.

For dinner we went to Golden Corral. On their web site the restaurant advertises its Veterans Day free meal, and says no ID is required. I thought that was a bad idea, but otherwise didn’t dwell on it. But when my wife and I arrived, I changed my mind real quick.

The restaurant’s parking lot was packed and a line snaked out the door. A few VFW members and high school ROTC cadets were outside talking to customers and handing out “I served” stickers to anyone who said they were a veteran. And I mean, all you had to do was claim to be a veteran to get a sticker. If you got one, you didn’t have to pay.

A few people in the line with “I served” stickers sure didn’t look like they were veterans. An overweight young man in front of us was wearing a t-shirt, pajama pants and house shoes. A VFW Vietnam vet asked him a few friendly questions about his service, just making conversation. I listened intently. The man’s answers were so quiet and slurred we could barely understand them. He claimed to be an Army Iraq and Afghanistan vet. Then the Vietnam vet talked about his own war, and laughingly mentioned that his unit had to deal with snakes, tigers and elephants. The supposed Iraq and Afghanistan Army veteran gave him a confused look and asked, “You were in Africa?”

My wife and I exchanged a look. The Vietnam vet was wearing a baseball cap with his unit patch and miniature medals on it, and also wore a vest covered in military patches. He had mentioned Vietnam several times. Maybe this guy in line in his PJs really was a veteran, and really was that clueless. But I fail to see how any military man could have misunderstood the Vietnam vet.

Then we got inside the restaurant. It was chaotic, loud and crowded. No problem with that. A waitress seated us at a table with a couple in their 60′s. Both wore “I served” stickers, and the woman wore a hat with a veterans’ organization logo on it. No problem with that either, I enjoy talking to older veterans.

But when we sat down, the woman ruined it by talking to us. Within minutes I learned that she had been “deep cover” for Army criminal investigations. And while she “had never actually enlisted in the military”, her work as an informant made her just like a veteran. Then she said she used to be in a volunteer state militia, and “that was just like being in the regular military”. As far as she was concerned, she was entitled to eat for free. 

So within the first five minutes after being seated, I find myself across the table from a military poser. At least her husband was honest. All he claimed to be was an Army mechanic.

Then we asked our waitress when we were supposed to pay. We had been herded from the buffet line to a table, but hadn’t been asked to pay for my wife’s meal. The waitress said, “Oh, you were supposed to pay back there. But don’t worry about it, just put a sticker on. People have been in here all day lying about being the military to get free food, but at least you were honest. So don’t worry about it.”

My wife put on the sticker, but later I yanked it off. I wasn’t willing to risk having anyone think she was a poser.

We got up to leave. I went to a manager and told her we needed to pay for my wife’s meal, and said I thought a lot of people in the restaurant were never in the military. She was thankful for the honesty, and said, “You know, I figure about a quarter of the people in here today are lying to us. My ex was a Marine, and I can usually tell when someone’s lying about the military. But we’re not supposed to ask for IDs or anything.”

While she was talking to me, a “veteran” walked out of the restaurant after finishing his meal. He was wearing an Army combat uniform with Air Force boots, was missing all his patches, and had a beard. An absolute, obvious poser. But he had gotten his free food.

I tensed up. This poser was wearing a uniform that I wear with pride, that I fought in, that friends of mine were killed or wounded in. I don’t have PTSD and am not prone to angry outbursts, but I felt a sudden urge to inflict homicidal violence on him.

My wife grabbed my arm and told me to calm down. I’ve confronted a major, professional poser once before, despite my wife’s requests that I just walk away. But this time I let it go.

I left there furious, and told my wife we wouldn’t be back next year. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Golden Corral’s attempt at honoring veterans for their service. Real vets can go there and get a free meal, which is a small but valuable show of support.

The problem is that any dishonorable loser too cheap to pay $12 can stand beside real vets and receive a gift they don’t deserve. GC’s system almost encourages abuse. The employees were certainly aware they were being scammed, and as a veteran I could plainly see it. But it wasn’t my place to be the gate guard at their restaurant, and apparently the corporate ownership has made peace with the fact that they’re being ripped off by posers. I guess they decided their noble gesture was worth the massive ripoff .

Any program that gives a reward without enforcing a standard begs to be exploited. If the organizers of the NYC Marathon advertise “Free jackets will be given away to anyone who finishes the race, no questions asked”, they should expect hundreds of people without a drop of sweat on their ill-fitting jogging suits to show up and demand their free jacket. We as a nation should know that we have thousands/tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands/maybe even millions of pathetic vultures in our midst, eagerly awaiting a chance to scam well-meaning people out of anything of value.

In my experience, those vultures are always on the prowl. On Veterans Day, they thought nothing of stealing accomplishments of men and women who have struggled and sacrificed and sometimes bled for this country. All that mattered to them is that they got something for free. In this case it was a $12 meal. In other cases it’s unemployment benefits, food stamps, free housing or something more valuable.

I’m trying not to be too cynical about this. I know real veterans got what they were promised. But I can’t shake the sense that the entire event was cheapened by the liars and posers who showed up.

To the owners of Golden Corral, thank you for trying to do something good for us veterans. But you almost ruined it by allowing it to be taken advantage of by liars and thieves. Please change your policy and ask for some proof of service. The military teaches us that honors must be earned, so real vets won’t complain about it. Make people show an ID, or a DD-214, or a VA card, or a picture in uniform. Have the VFW members at the door question idiots like the bearded guy in the mismatched uniform. Put up a sign outside that says, “We encourage real veterans to savagely beat anyone they catch lying about military service”.

Maybe some posers will still get through. But at least they’ll have to make a damn effort to do it.

Available in print and as an ebook from Amazon.com and Tactical16.com. Available electronically from iTunes/iBooks and Barnesandnoble.com.

The day we arrived, the community was waiting for a different Marine combat unit to return from the war. Welcome Home banners were spread between light poles over roads, every bank and business in town had signs praising the Marines for their wartime service, and local civilians lined the streets waving American flags. We entered the base to the applause of people who thought we were returning heroes. In truth, we had watched the war on TV and only left home a week earlier. The community’s heartfelt gratitude, expressed to those of us who had done nothing, made me feel like a fraud.

Please don’t do that to other veterans today. Don’t make them feel guilty for taking the praise others deserve. And don’t think that you’re somehow slighting them by not calling them “heroes”. Keep in mind that most veterans aren’t heroes, they are simply men and women who have served honorably. There’s a big difference.

One night at a hotel bar before we went to Kosovo, I sat at a table with several Vietnam veteran police officers. They talked about their experiences and one-upped each other the way all Soldiers and cops do. “I was a Marine grunt at Khe Sanh, 67-68. It was rough.” “Oh yeah? I was artillery, near Da Nang during Tet.” “I was a slick pilot in the 101^st, my Huey got the crap shot out of it several times.”

During that conversation, one gray-haired officer sat with a smile on his face, listening to the ground-pounders brag. Then he spoke up in an exaggerated, flamboyant tone: “I was in the Air Force at Tan Son Nut air base. Got a great tan.”

In the twelve years and two wars that have passed since then, I’ve learned that the Air Force Vietnam veteran had a much more typical war experience than the others at the table. Even in World War II, only a very small percentage of our troops actually faced combat. Most troops who served in Iraq and many who served in Afghanistan never heard a shot fired, rarely left the relative safety of a firebase, never faced anything more dangerous than occasional, inaccurate rocket and mortar fire. Those who left the wire to engage the enemy on a regular basis were a relatively rare breed.

Because of this, many of us in the military are uncomfortable when we hear civilians refer to all service members and veterans as “heroes”. Heroism isn’t a requirement to simply be in the military, or to serve in war. The jobs I did in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were nowhere near the most dangerous jobs in those wars, may have required instances of bravery but didn’t demand heroism.

When I evaluate true heroism, I always look to those who served in the worst, hardest wartime situations. My great uncle Leo Moreno was in the Bataan Death March, but apparently never made it to a prison camp. In 1942 my great grandparents received a telegram that he was “Missing, Presumed Dead”. His little brother was a Marine at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, one of the Marine Corps’ legendary battles. Another of my great uncles was a paratrooper who jumped at Sicily, Normandy and Holland. I grew up across the street from a man who, as a 20 year old sergeant, took command of his platoon after it was overrun and led a counterattack against a North Vietnamese unit.

Those men were heroes. Most of us serving today aren’t. This weighs heavily on me every time someone shakes my hand and praises me for my service, because I’m worried they’re giving me credit for heroism that I haven’t earned.

This isn’t to say our troops haven’t made sacrifices. We all have. Many of us have given up time with families, missed births of children, been away when loved ones passed on. Marriages have crumbled under the strain of separation. Soldiers serving “safe” jobs have died when one of those random, occasional rockets landed close enough to envelop them in its killing radius.

But we aren’t all the same, haven’t faced all the same dangers, and don’t all deserve the same accolades. There are differences between those who face rare and random danger, those who go out daily to seek that danger, and those who willingly expose themselves to near-certain death in order to help others. Recognition of true heroism becomes diluted when a soldier who writes accounting reports at division headquarters is put on the same pedestal as a soldier who lost an arm throwing back an enemy grenade.

So what I’m asking is this: today, Veteran’s Day 2012, don’t call all veterans and service members heroes. If you meet someone who served or still serves and don’t know anything else about them, just shake their hand and thank them for their service. Don’t praise them for things they may have never done. Remember that most aren’t heroes, and even those who are probably don’t want to be reminded of it. Soldiers rarely earn the title “hero” on missions where everything goes right and all the good guys survive.

Heroism or not, this generation’s military service holds a deep meaning. Anyone who joined or reenlisted after 9/11 voluntarily joined a military at war. After the first few months of the Iraq War, they knew there is no completely safe job in the military. During my deployment to Iraq we had cooks and mechanics out on convoy escort missions. We saw Air Force and Navy convoy escort teams on the road. Units with the safe Cold War mission of driving supply trucks wound up performing some of the most dangerous missions and facing some of the most serious threats.

Every man or woman who left the wire, even one time, had the moment where they locked and loaded their weapon and mentally prepared for combat. Inherent in that act is at least the knowledge that you may have to sacrifice your own life for the lives of others. Some troops are more willing than others to make that sacrifice, but every single man or woman on every mission knows they may have to.

At the extreme end of that willingness to sacrifice are the rare cases where someone throws themselves on a grenade to save others. Somewhat less extreme are the thousands of cases of soldiers holding their positions in a dangerous, exposed area because someone has to cover that sector. Somewhere on that spectrum are Soldiers like my assistant team leader in Afghanistan, who yelled a warning to me to take cover from passing bullets even though he was in the open and more likely to get shot than I was. Somewhere on that spectrum is my friend DJ, who ran from his humvee to check on civilian truck drivers while his convoy was stopped and under fire. Those who never leave the wire may have to hold a perimeter during an attack, or leave the safety of a concrete bunker to account for their troops between rocket impacts. Even if a service member never leaves the United States, they still willingly assign their lives a lesser value than the lives of their comrades, and the lives of civilians. Other than jumping on a grenade, none of that is heroism. But all of it is service.

Those of us who serve or have served don’t deserve to be worshipped for the rest of our lives. The few who are truly heroes will stand out forever, but for most servicemen and women the military is just something that occupies a few years between high school and later adulthood. Most service members go on to lead lives indistinguishable from those who haven’t served. And we all know those few who were total screwups, joined the military, then came home and went right back to being screwups.

The one thing those different types of veterans have in common is one single decision they made: to put other people’s lives before their own. Some of them made that decision, never left the country and never had to test it. Some of them proved the seriousness of their commitment under fire thousands of miles from home. Whatever their experience, whether they proved their bravery in combat or never heard a shot fired in anger, whether they spent thirty years in the military and retired or served two years and did nothing but make bad life choices afterward, one special thing about veterans makes them worthy of your gratitude.

No nation can survive without those who are willing to defend the frontier against threatening hordes. A culture which lacks warriors willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good can expect to last no more than a few decades. When our veterans made that decision to place your life before theirs, even if it was just for a moment, they were the giants upon whose shoulders this great nation stands. And that selfless moment of service, not heroism, is what they deserve to be thanked for.