Eighty-nine years ago this Sunday, the war to end all wars, what we know as World War I, came to an end on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It is a a moment still commemorated around the world. It is called Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and Armistice Day in France and most of Europe. In the United States we call the day Veterans Day in honor of veterans of all our wars, not just the First World War.

Our forebears of four score and eight years ago thought upon the signing of the armistice it was to be a time of peace for mankind. They came to that conclusion because the death and destruction of the war just ended was fresh in memory. Sons were gone, buried in Flemish fields, never to return to till Iowa corn, South Downs meadows or Austrian Alps. A generation was lost in that war to a failure of political vision and leadership.

Surely, people honestly thought, we would not make that mistake again. We could not go to war again for these reasons; we could not again ask our young men, filled as they are with optimism and confidence, to give all because a prince in some faraway city was murdered.

To ensure that we did not pursue war foolishly, and assure a recognition that all people everywhere were affected by war's conflagration, the League of Nations was formed in the wake of that war's horror. War itself was outlawed by the Pact of Paris, the Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928. Outlawed. It seems quaint as we wade through the muck and morass of the second quagmire of my life. It seems, at least on the part of our nation's current political leadership, that cobwebs hang where fresh memories once were.

But it is a testament to our nation's strength that young men and young women still love the idea of America so much that they are willing to put it all on the line so that you and I and our children and their children can live in freedom. So that you and I can give to our children America's gift to the world: hope. They sign up no matter what to be sailors and soldiers, Marines and airmen, knowing that they may, indeed in some cases will, be in harm's way.

Among us walk those who in past times served so that we might shop at Macy's, have a Big Mac, watch the ballgame, write or read a book, learn a new language, watch our high-schooler's play, practice yoga, help out at a soup kitchen, demonstrate against the war, run for office, write an opinion piece, be an American.

They are veterans who served. Some in hot places, some filling orders so that the guys in hot spots would be OK. Some for two or three years, others for a career.

To all of them this Veterans Day, to those who served in "The Big One," Korea, the 'Nam, Gulf one and Gulf two and all the small stuff the you never hear about in between, I say thank you for the greatest gift given to human beings in the history of this planet: the right to be an American. Thank you for your life, your limb, your blood and your sacrifice.

And thank you as well to the Gold Star Mothers; your sacrifice is just as deep.

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Londonderry police Capt. Bill Hart's column appears Fridays in the Derry News.