Student Essay: When is the Right Time to Honor Our Military Heroes?
Victoria DeShazer, 7th-grade student at Troy Junior High, accepts a certificate of excellence and a $50 cash prize from Billie Jo Brue, Troy VFW Auxiliary president, for taking first place in the Courtesy Patriot's Pen Essay Contest. The national contest was sponsored locally by VFW Post No. 5514 with assistance from the Auxiliary. The theme of this year's essay is "When is the right time to honor our military heroes?" DeShazer's essay will be judged on the state level and could be eligible to compete for national honors.
When is the right time to honor our military heroes? The answer is all of the time. Every day there is someone (maybe not someone you know) out there defending our country. How do you think it makes those people feel when they get a letter from their family in the mail? Knowing that there is someone out there thinking of them? It doesn’t even have to be from someone they know. When one of our heroes gets a specially made package in the mail from some random person, they know that there are some people out there who spend their day making a letter or package for another hero that they know nothing about.
Every year, a certain percentage of our troops come back. And every year that percentage is less and less. There are people working for our military and defending our country that don’t know if they will be able to come back to their family at the end of the day. Our troops spend more and more time each year away from their families. Now our heroes stay maybe years away from home as opposed to only a few months.
All of our veterans/troops (living or not) deserve to be honored. You don’t need a holiday like Veterans Day to go down and put flowers on the graves of the heroes that died fighting for our country. You don’t need July or Veterans Day to go down to the VFW and give one of our veterans a gift bag or a buddy–poppy. Our troops and veterans are always more than happy to receive one of our thanks on a random day. When is the right time to honor our military heroes? The answer is all of the time.
(Victoria DeShazer is a seventh-grader at Troy Junior High).