It’s been an honor to have worked with people from all branches of our military for the past week on the special feature in Wednesday’s paper.

Hearing them talk, watching the memories pass fleetingly over their faces, their voices filled with emotions that I could only imagine, I felt as if I were in the company of a group of heroes ... and I was.

Their stories were amazing. Some were too graphic to tell, some were heartbreakingly tender and occasionally there were funny aspects to their time spent serving the country.

Jerry Teichmiller and Phillip Lambert looked at me oddly when I mentioned firefights. “What do you know about firefights?” they asked in unison.

“Rambo?” I answered hesitantly. They got a good laugh out of that one.

Lambert was in the Air Force. When I asked him why that branch of service, he grinned and said, “Why walk around the world when you can fly?”

Both are sheriff’s deputies on courthouse security detail.  Lambert who is Chief of Security, made light of what he did in the service, but the upshot of it was, he was sort of like a military James Bond. Espionage and counter-espionage, intelligence and counter-intelligence, what else could it have been? But the most he’ll say by way of bragging rights is that he was the first OSI agent sent to foreign soil. Cloak and dagger work suits, the tall man with the full head of wavy white hair ... you can just imagine him in London, walking down a rain-swept backstreet, passing a folded newspaper to a nondescript man walking in the opposite direction.

All this is conjecture; I watch a lot of spy movies.

Jerry Teichmiller is a retired Marine, and proud of it. He loved the Marines. He was a drill sergeant for several years and was able to pass along his experience to raw recruits, hoping it would serve them well in combat.

Being a Marine in the Vietnam era made a man tough. Unlike his World War II and Desert Storm counterparts, he wasn’t greeted with a ticker tape parade or yellow ribbons round the old oak tree.

His welcome was rotten fruit thrown by Berkeley hippies outside the San Francisco Marine base. He had no idea what was coming at him. He thought he was just doing his job, and he was. (He was good at it, too. How do I know that? Because he was alive and sitting right in front of me).

Unlike 58,000 of his comrades and an untold number of walking wounded, he isn’t a name on a wall or statistic on a graph. But you can see by the look in his eyes that he has trouble accepting that fact.

Both men admit that they frequently ask “Why me? Why am I alive and so many are not?”

In all wars, men have probably asked that question. There is no answer.

Later wars have been fought on different soils, but the goal has always been the same, to preserve and protect our freedom and our way of life.

Men and women are deploying right now to carry on that tradition. Men like Skip Griffin, who left just last week. Skip took time out of his preparations to tell me a little about why he does what he does. He feels strongly about his service. He feels anguished over having been away from home when his sons were growing up. He knows that if not for the people who sacrifice that precious time with their families, we might not be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

There are people like Mark Persall, and Jim Butts, who work for the Cullman County Sheriff’s Office. Men who have never seen actual close combat, but were trained and ready to face that challenge. Both men now use that training to serve and protect those you and your friends and neighbors and strangers, too. Their sense of commitment and duty is obvious when they talk about their dedication to that service. For Persall, it was an obligation he felt to his country, for Butts, it was an overwhelming desire to do something worthwhile.

One picture shows Persall propped up on the wing of a plane, the earnest look on his handsome face is like that of a young Lindbergh, ready to take on the world if need be.   

Anna McGriff volunteered in peace time for the WACs. She had no idea that she would spend most of the remainder of her life dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

Her husband, Dwaine McGriff, was critically wounded when the vehicle he was in rolled over the top of a Viet Cong tunnel, which just happened to be the enemies headquarters. They came scurrying out of those tunnels like a swarm of angry bees, blowing away men who were just trying to get through another day in the jungle and back home as quickly as possible.

Anna spent the following 28 years caring for him, making sure that he knew that he was loved and appreciated for what he had done. She wears his memory like a badge today, proudly and with grace.

She says that when she watches the news now and hears of soldiers who are killed or wounded, her heart goes out to the families because she knows what is in store for them. “But we were lucky, it could have been worse, he had his hands, his eyes and his mind,” she says.

I think Mother Theresa probably said things like that, and look where it got her…

It was a humbling experience, watching and listening to these people who never once sounded bitter, never once asked for piety or glory, but only for respect and understanding.

It was so different from some other recent assignments, frivolous, fun assignments, which never brought tears to my eyes or kept me awake at night. It was overwhelming to have them thank me for telling their story….didn’t they know that the privilege was mine? Just to meet them and shake their hands or to hear their stories?

When you go into the courthouse and see the two gentlemen waiting to take your nail file or your car keys before you go through the metal detector, you might just take an extra moment to absorb the fact that these are heroes, just like the deputies who might stop you for speeding, the mechanic who works on your car, or the little lady in front of you in line at the grocery store. You’ll just never know the dues some of them paid. The price of freedom sure isn’t free.