Armistice Day, as Veterans Day was first called, recognized the day the ceasefire was signed during World War I, putting an end to hostilities on November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m., on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Armistice Day was first designated to honor those who fought in World War I, which was said to be "a war to end all wars." Unfortunately, it didn't. Following World War II and the Korean War, Congress replaced the word "Armistice" with "Veterans" to honor all American veterans. 

Here today we honor a community rich in the military tradition and I am honored to be among you. We see among the crowd that has gathered in this room more than 70 years of military history — this is an incredible group to be addressing — I believe we have WWII veterans all the way to the (veterans of the) Global War on Terror.

Someone told me that personal stories helped make a good speech much more memorable. Like most veterans I tend not to share war stories. I am not sure why we stay silent but that seems to be true across generations of veterans who share similar experiences. Tonight I will make a brief exception to this silent rule and hopefully the audience will indulge me while I share a story or two.

I am a veteran of the war in Iraq and, like several other million soldiers, I spent more than a year deployed in Iraq supporting the larger global war on terror.

Deployed in 2005, I had the opportunity to witness our Army's transition from a force who trained to fight and win the nation's wars in the traditional sense: through the effective deployment of tanks, artillery batteries, infantry, ships, missiles, aircraft and soldiers against the enemy to one with an infinitely harder mission.

Many thought that we could simply fight our way to victory. Victory proved elusive. Killing or capturing three insurgent personnel would lead to the creation of 10 more.

We found ourselves engaged in a game of whack-a-mole for which there would be no end. It was clear that a change in strategy was necessary and we had leadership brave enough to bring this change about. This change was called counter-insurgency operations.

In short this meant that we were to clear, hold and build: we would seek to clear our areas of operations of the really bad guys and the violent weapons through which they would attack and disrupt daily life; hold that land to keep violence at a minimum through aggressive actions and our presence; and finally, to build infrastructure and local security forces so that a new order could rise.

For more than a year, I ran a scout platoon as part of a larger infantry company in areas west of Baghdad. In that year we conducted more than 300 operations and succeeded in reducing violence in our area from more than 10 significant violent events per day to less than 10 per month.

As you might imagine, this was an interesting time. I remember one particular night when we were running a checkpoint and there was no traffic because the time was about 4:30 a.m. or so; I witnessed the sunrise over the Euphrates river and my interpreter, an Iraqi citizen who we called Rocky (evidently he had been a Olympic weightlifter back in the 1980s) decided to come over to talk to me about paradise.

He said, you know, “Iraq is like paradise ... heaven will be the same." I remember gazing at several bomb craters within eyeshot and thinking about the 130 degree Fahrenheit temperatures that day and finally responding, "Rocky, if this is heaven, what's hell like?" He laughed — I wasn’t joking.

These days were not without close calls. One night we began our patrol by leaving the relative familiarity of our own area of operations that we patrolled daily and went to the Green Zone to pick up a soldier who had been on a three-day pass.

For the majority of us, this represented our only chance to visit the Green zone. That day I took a break from seeing the simple concrete shops, poor housing, and austere buildings that was the norm in my own area of operations and had the chance to walk through Saddam's palace — ensuring that I visited his bathroom with the golden toilet seat.

I also walked by the local very western looking hotels and even saw a typical Chinese restaurant serving takeout with a line. I assure you these scenes — especially a real Chinese take-out place — was not common to areas I spent all my time in. It was kind of like walking into a weird parallel universe that wasn't as bad for a few hours.

We had to be back in our own sector of operations in the desert by 2100 hrs ( or 9 p.m.). This was about an hour’s drive from the Green Zone due west on unfamiliar highways. As was typical, we had a four-vehicle convoy of heavily armored Humvees and heavy weapons in every gun turret.

As the sun faded and darkness fell we opted to avoid using our "white lights" and instead preferred to use our night vision. The most common threat at this time was the "improvised explosive device" or basically homemade bombs usually made from rigging an ignition device to detonation cord with old mortar shells or plastic explosives.

The conventional wisdom was that someone needed to see you in order to pull the trigger on an improvised explosive device. Using night vision and our blackout drive lights that were invisible to the naked eye we could see but normally not be seen by others looking to do us harm.

On this particular night we were driving past an off-ramp on a major highway when it began to rain hard.

Now this is the desert. It rained twice that year and the only time it rained hard was this particular moment. I remember looking out and thinking, "how about that, we have some real rain."

About two minutes later the rain suddenly stopped and almost immediately afterwards, I jumped from my seat and heard a large pop, an immediate boom and a bright flash right outside my truck door. As I was trained, I reached back and grabbed my gunner who was in the gun turret behind me and pulled him down beneath the protective armored shielding in his gun turret.

I then grabbed the hand mic on my radios and called back to my rear gun truck to stop so that he would avoid that area. My driver stopped our truck about 25 meters past the site. We were all unharmed. My gunner jumped back up in the turret and grabbed our spotlight and began shining white light to see what had happened.

We saw what appeared to be a very large undetonated group of mortar shells that were daisy chained together so that in theory they would explode as one. We called the bomb squad to come join us to detonate the explosives. When the bomb squad eventually arrived, they sent out a robot to investigate.

What they found was that the relatively small explosion that I witnessed directly outside my truck door was the result of my vehicle running over a pressure sensor that triggered the detonator to go off with some gasoline that was being used as a kind of primer.

The detonator popped and the gasoline ignited but the explosives did not discharge. It turns out that the rain, which remember just started falling two minutes earlier, and only happened once that year — had shorted out the primary fuse and caused it to fail. The bomb squad commander came and spoke to me after the detonation and gave me a laugh — "so you guys cheated death. You oughta start smoking," he laughed as he took a long drag on his own cigarette.

To this day I remain humbled and grateful that the grace of God saw me through that day. By that time in my tour I was familiar enough with the numerous improvised explosive devices that we encountered to know that the one that night, had it gone off, would have destroyed my truck and likely killed me and my crew. I stand before you today only because it rained at exactly the right moment.

To bring this story back full circle — those experiences are typical of a counter-insurgency conflict. There are still bad guys that need finding but, the guy that likely planted that particular explosive was probably some farmer whose family was held hostage until he placed the improvised explosive device or he was paid some small sum of money because he needed it.

More than likely, he was not acting out of any sort of conviction. We never figured out the circumstances behind this particular bomb but there were many similar events that we were able to run down.

Rather than focusing on the local nationals who weren't too thrilled that we were there but also weren't jihadists, we focused on the mission: clear the areas of threats to include IEDs; create conditions where people were safe in their communities; tracking down foreign fighters aggressively (preventing wanton kidnapping and generally taking away the ability of the enemy to infiltrate communities because we got to know who should be around); and finally creating local security forces and infrastructure to give those people a stake in our success.

A few years afterward it did appear that we were successful. The Iraqi Security forces had taken over the security role and we transitioned to a support operation. Unfortunately, recent events with ISIS appear to indicate that our success was short lived.

I am confident that the clash of civilizations, as this generational conflict has been defined, will be a long one and it is not clear to me what our role ultimately should and will be ... and luckily for me ... that’s not what this speech is about.

This speech is about our appreciation generally of all veterans and our collective thank you all for the roles you have played in defense of our great nation.

Tonight is really about the individual stories that we occasionally choose to share, but normally, we carry in silence.

In any case, we set aside this day every year to reflect and appreciate our veterans.

As our service members depart from our shores, we look forward to their safe return home. But we know that some of them will not. It is our responsibility to honor those who return home, especially our wounded warriors. And, we must never forget those who paid for our freedom with the ultimate sacrifice. We must also honor the families of our veterans, who sacrifice in their own, often uncelebrated ways.

We all know of these men and women who have not returned. I went to school, and two of my classmates didn’t come home from their deployments in Iraq. Their names are Andrew Bacevich, age 26, of Boston, Massachusetts, who was killed in May 2007 by an improvised explosive device and Ben Keating of Sanford, Maine who was killed in 2006, age 24, in a truck accident.

I remember talking with Ben in 2004 as we attended Armor Officer Basic course together in Fort Knox, Kentucky. He was a quiet man, thoughtful, and had attended school in Maine. He planned to serve his four years in the Army, go to law school, and someday run to become a senator in Maine. Big goals! Sadly, we will never know what his life would have become.

That’s my speech. I thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight. I hope you enjoyed it and wish you all the very best. God bless!