All politics aside, 3,125 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, many more have been wounded physically and psychologically. I pray for those who serve, their families, and those have served throughout our tortured history. I wish to honor all of our fallen soldiers. They have given the supreme sacrifice for freedoms we hold dear. Though I am a veteran, I never served during hostilities. For those who have in the past or do, I salute and honor you. The following portion of John Donne's poem was an epigraph for Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls . I hope it is fitting and appropriate. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it
