So I got up first with the men from World War II. There weren't any World War I veterans there. There may be a few alive, but they've got to be about a hundred, if they are.

And then it struck me. First, that there weren't very many World War II veterans walking around and secondly that I had not the vaguest idea what my fellow GIs had done in the war, the Big War as we used to call it.

Yet we all were hailed as heroes.

I don't know why the first issue should have surprised me. Every now and then someone reminds me World War II veterans are dying off at the rate of 2,000 or so a day.

When you consider there were five or six million veterans of the Second World War—by far the biggest conflict we've fought to date—and that most WWII veterans are at least in their late seventies—that's not so dramatic, after all.

But the second issue does sometimes bother me. How many of us were "heroes?" I certainly never thought I was. Still, the question used to come up all the time. What exactly were we doing?

"What are you going to tell your grandchildren when they ask you what you did in the war?"

In my own case, it's simple: I was a really terrible Army "tailor" for nine months and the rest of the war I spent as a combat infantryman.

I knew a lot of men who had much less arduous service. There was, for instance, the man in the clothing section (where I was a sort of tailor) who spent the entire war cutting hair. That's what he did in civilian life and that's what he did after he got inducted.

Or there was another friend who spent almost all of his war as a radar operator in Thule, Greenland. I suppose that's a kind of combat post, but most of his time was spent in avoiding freezing to death or dying of boredom.

I knew a pharmacist who was a pharmacist in civilian life and a pharmacist all his Army career. He celebrated the night the war ended in the Pacific working at a pro station in Manila, The Philippines.

(And if you don't know what a pro station is, I have to explain it was devoted to preventing venereal disease in the days before antibiotics. Not the best place to celebrate the end of the war.)

I also knew a guy who was a cook all his Army career, one who spent a good part of his time in the Air Force tending a furnace in a barracks complex and another who was a "frozen" air cadet. Because the Air Force didn't want the Army to get him, they kept him permanently as a cadet and flew him around the country on various ambiguous missions. The war ended before he ever got into flight training.

That's how it was in the Big War. I don't know how it was in Vietnam or the first Gulf War or how it is in Iraq. But I can imagine. Few are in the front line banging away with a rifle or a machine gun. In fact, only a minority of the men drafted, mustered into or otherwise enlisted in the service really "fought" the war.

And most of them didn't do it very long. The rate of attrition, to use a polite term, that is the rate at which soldiers got killed and wounded was such that to spend six months as a frontline infantry soldier was unusual. On the day I first entered combat, for instance, two of the five other men who went into the front line with me were wounded within 15 minutes. So far as I know that was their war. They never came back.

What I am trying to say is that even though all veterans had their lives disrupted in one way or another, it was more disruption for some than it was for others. Fewer were in harm's way than most.

I always had a kind of rule of thumb. The more men talked about their war, the less they really did—or so the theory went, anyway. I'm not sure that's a real measure of patriotic devotion, because I've known combat veterans who talked a lot about what happened to them (and a lot did) and those who wouldn't tell me anything.

But I've also gotten the feeling over the years that if you talk to a veteran long enough (and you are a combat veteran yourself), you can pretty much tell whether they are embroidering the truth or whether what they are telling you is what really happened.

And in the long run I suppose it doesn't really matter much anyway. The deeds we did as individuals now aren't so important as the sum total of the service we gave our country.

What really counts is that we stood and served. And that, too, is what will come to be the reckoning when this latest and most unfortunate war someday comes to an end and contributes its veterans to those who have served the nation.

They will know what they did. That's what matters. Not what they tell others about it.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to Almaden Resident.