Well, thank you, Doug, and thanks to all of you for your service. And let me just be another voice that says to all of our nation's veterans, to their families, to their friends, to their children, to everybody who has served the United States of America in uniform, but also to the people who made it possible for them to serve the United States in uniform. This is your day. Happy Veterans Day, my fellow veterans. We're proud of you, and we're never going to stop fighting for you.
So, 22 years before Abraham Lincoln was president, he observed that it was our veterans who were the memorial to generations past, to the wars that they fought and to the freedoms that they earned. And in his time, he was talking about the generation of Revolutionary War veterans who had served their country honorably, and they were passing away. And he likened it to a massive, beautiful forest where every day we would lose one or another giant, beautiful oak tree.
Think about what those veterans represented before we had these beautiful monuments, before we had stone temples built to honor those who served. The first memorial to our nation's freedoms and the wars that made them possible were our veterans. You saw them in the friends that you served with. You saw them in the people who lost limbs. You saw them in the headstones that represented a life that had served the United States of America.
We are, of course, proud in this amazing city, in this beautiful capital of ours. We're proud of all these incredible monuments, but we know that the most important monuments to our generations who served in the military, our most important monuments are you. It is the people who had the courage and the willpower and the fight to put on the uniform of the United States of America and say, don't send my neighbor, send me. That is the greatest monument to America. It's you all. It's the fact that you serve.
But just as in Lincoln's time, some of those monuments were disappearing, one of the amazing responsibilities and the humbling responsibilities as a veteran is that we have to pick up the torch when one generation sets it down. Now, when I first started doing work with the generations of veterans in Vietnam, one of the things they told me, one of the most important things they took to heart is that they did not want to leave the next generation of veterans behind.
Anybody who's talked to a veteran of Vietnam knows that they were fighting not just for their benefits, not just so that the country honored the promises that were made to the generation in Vietnam, they were also fighting so that the generations that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that the government honored those promises as well. Because one of the most important things our veterans do is not just fight for their country, they fight for their fellow veterans. And let me say as one veteran to the next, we are picking up that torch every single day. We will never leave our veterans behind, ladies and gentlemen. That is my most sacred promise to every person here today.
But just as in Lincoln's time, he was witnessing that amazing Revolutionary War generation lose an oak tree every single day. So in our time, we are watching fewer and fewer World War II veterans who still remember what it was like to serve in one of our nation's greatest and most historic triumphs in 251 years of proud history. And so I want to give a special shout out to three World War II generation veterans who are here with us today and I ask that they be recognized and that is Dave Yoho, Clifford Richardson and Julian Smith. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your service.
Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow veterans, this is your day of course and I want you to celebrate. I want you to have a good time and in my family our great tradition because veterans ate free at Golden Corral was to go to Golden Corral. We had one guy in the back standing up and clapping. But whatever your tradition is, I want you to enjoy this day, but I also want you to take some special commitment.
Just as the generations of World War II veterans and the generation of Vietnam veterans fought for my generation of veterans, it is now our time to pick up the torch and to fight for the next generation of veterans. So yes, ladies and gentlemen, let's celebrate our veterans, but I want every single veteran here, every single veteran in our country to remember that our job is to fight for the next generation of veterans and that is exactly what we're going to do.
