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11/11/2007: "Veterans Day 2007. A Time To Say “Thank You”"

(Local members of the Women’s Auxiliary of the American Legion collect items to be shipped to our troops overseas)

By Gordon Mansfield

On this Veterans Day 2007, we come together as a Nation to thank our veterans for their service and to let them know that their service and sacrifices will never be taken for granted.

Americans are blessed to live in a Nation of democracy and freedom. For these blessings we thank our veterans. Here and in communities across this great country, we honor veterans for protecting and securing democracy and freedom throughout our history.

Our veterans are everyday men and women we know as friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues who have served our Nation in extraordinary ways. They have preserved and strengthened our country and made sacrifices beyond duty’s call. Even as we honor them this Veterans Day, their successors are courageously defending our freedoms at home and abroad. Veterans and their families are truly among our finest citizens.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, we are proud to fulfill the solemn pledge of President Abraham Lincoln who, during his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, set forth our obligation to care for those injured in body and spirit in their defense of our Nation and for the families of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. The VA and the over quarter million men and women serving in it give daily endorsement of President Lincoln’s commitment, and do so in a spirit of compassion, respect, sensitivity and gratitude. Let us today, therefore, remember Lincoln’s charge to us:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.


(Gordon Mansfield is the Acting Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs; the above is his official Veterans Day message )