Veterans Day honors all who have served, but the costs over the past 20-plus years now have been borne mostly by those sent to battle Al Qaeda and ISIS or their affiliates across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

And they’re still paying. In the first four months following Hamas‘ attack on Israel last October, for example, roughly 186 U.S. military personnel were injured or killed in the volatile region, nearly 70 percent due to traumatic brain injuries, according to the Pentagon. The stretchers and caskets are still coming home.

Yesterday, CBS Sunday Morning presented a moving tribute to former battlefield medic Joe Dan Worley, who was grievously wounded in the Battle of Fallujah, where he was badly shot up and lost his left leg to a roadside bomb as he ran to rescue his comrades. In the wake of that nightmare he also nearly lost his marriage, due to a long and painful recovery hampered by dwindling finances and Post-Traumatic Stress. The Semper Fi and America’s Fund, launched in 2003 by military spouses who understood the intense financial and psychological emergencies faced by such families, came to their rescue. (If you want to do more than offer solemn respect to the fallen, send them money.)

Longtime SpyTalk readers, meanwhile, may recall my past tributes to Ron Capps, a CIA-trained Army intelligence officer and later crisis-scene diplomat with the State Department, who was inserted into the middle of some of the world’s worst catastrophes of the 1990s and beyond, from Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan to the civil wars and genocide raging across Central and East Africa.

“It just about broke him,” I wrote last Memorial Day, “as have the repeated counterterror tours carried out by so many of our veterans, who are now struggling in unprecedented numbers with post-traumatic stress.”

But Ron is one of the lucky ones. He’s survived and flourished. Not only that, over the past dozen or so years since leaving government service he’s selflessly helped countless other veterans rebound. For starters, he founded the Veterans Writing Project, which encouraged and helped former warriors organize their experiences into publishable stories, books and scripts—which has had some major successes. Capps also returned to his youthful roots as a successful, pre-Army barroom singer-songwriter to craft beautiful odes to fellow war fighters passing through their own crises. The previous February, I featured Ron’s work and backstory on a weekly edition of the SpyTalk podcast.

I hope you’ll visit the show. But before you go on this Veterans Day, I urge you listen the heart-breaking refrain of Ron Capp’s absolutely stunning This Time:

And your little girl wants to know
When she sits down for suppertime
Is that the last time you’ll have to go
Daddy, did you win the war this time?

One of the many spirit-crushing effects of repeated counterterrorism missions is the guilty feeling of not having been being to prevent the wanton murder, rape, and genocide that so often accompany mass civil strife—indeed, maybe even having directly or indirectly contributed to it in some fashion.

In Trying to Catch Amnesia, he sings, “And when the walls close in, he’ll pray to St. Tequila.”

Requiems for Our Fallen Counter-Terrorism Warriors

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