Well thank you for your service . You may not think you’re a hero but you’re a better man than I am and so is my son.
You are too kind, really. Audie Murphy was a hero, and so was Sergeant York, and I feel that calling ALL of us vets heroes, diminishes those men.
That sounds all hyper-patriotic - and I"m sure a lot of folks will knee jerk agree - but it's demonstrably false. A case can be made that there was very little noble about being in the armed services from the end of Nam through the Carter administration. So those who were 18 in the years of say 1970 through the year 1980 had little motivation to join as an example. Lot of folks joined then simply as a jobs program.
Besides, if every man is a soldier, who the hell does the rest of the work?