My blogfather makes a good point here about Veterans Day:

This is not a day for joy. It is not a day for a "Sale." It is or should be a solemn day where we remember those who have or are at this very moment serving our country. Many have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedoms we continue to enjoy.

InstaPundit links to Donald Sensing's Veterans Day post. Reflecting on the history of our country's wars in light of the September 11 attacks, Reverend Sensing reminds us of Heinlein's definition of veteran:

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote the best definition of veterans that I have ever read. He was a medically-retired US Navy officer himself when he wrote his classic novel, Starship Troopers. In it he said that there is only one distinction between veterans and non-veterans. It isn’t intelligence or education or class. It is only the fact that veterans are those who have put their own mortal bodies between their loved ones’ homes and the war’s desolation, a fact that the full verses of the Star Spangled Banner first recognized. Veterans are those who love others enough to risk laying down their lives for them, especially people they do not even know. That’s all patriotism is, really: the willingness to risk yourself on behalf of people you do not actually know.

So the firemen and police and rescue workers of New York and Arlington, Va., are veterans of a new kind for a new kind of war.

I think most Americans would agree. Please take a spare moment to honor the veterans. If you are looking for some way to do that, in addition to reading the above links, you might use that moment to visit this site.