Congressman Sam Johnson (R-Texas) is one of those heroes. Johnson was a POW for seven years in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was held in solitary confinement for 42 months and repeatedly tortured. He says veterans "stand for honesty, integrity, hard work, personal responsibility, perseverance and a love for freedom."
"We just owe them a deep sense of gratitude -- and you know, I think we have to remember freedom isn't free," he says. "I remember one of our guys, when we were getting out of Vietnam prisons over there, left an inscription on a wall which said: 'Freedom has a taste to those who fight and almost die that the protected will never know.'"
Jim Brown |