All these men, whose lives and deaths we commemorate, share a common ideal of service and loyalty to their country.
They deserve our respect and support in whatever actions they are dispatched to undertake. They put themselves in harms way to make OUR lives safer and more secure.
All the more reprehensible then that their lives are wasted, in the pursuit of political advantage and adventure, by men who are not fit to clean their boots.
I mean of course the politicians who lie to the public in order to indulge in wars of acquisition (Iraq!), and worse, wars with no genuine purpose other than to keep the populace scared enough to give up their civil liberties, in exchange for a spurious promised security (Afghanistan!).
We need to impress upon our governments that we KNOW that the best way to avoid terrorist attacks on our homelands is to keep our NOSES out of other countries' business, and our TROOPS at home defending OUR OWN shores.
This is true for Britain, and it is true for the USA, and were it taken to heart by those who rule, we might one day be celebrating, on the 11th November at 11.00am, in remembrance of the last ever soldiers killed in foreign lands.