On Nov. 11, 1918 at 11 a.m. in France, World War I ended.

Truth be told, the end of World War I was only a 20-year pause until the beginning of World War II. A history professor I know believes future historians will view 1914 to 1945 as one long war, even though warfare wasn’t taking place for most of those 31 years. But certainly what World War I didn’t solve — that is, basically everything — World War II had to solve.

And of course World War II, the war after the War to End All Wars, ended war for all of five years. The combatants of World War II ended up as allies against a member of one of World War II’s winning side, the Soviet Union, barely three years after World War II ended. One of the victims of the eventual losing side, and thus an ally of World War II’s winners, China, was the power behind the enemy in the Korean War, one year after adopting the system of the Soviets, though the Soviets and Chinese weren’t really allies during the Cold War.

The proxies of the West and the Soviets fought each other in the Vietnam War, which ended with the American-backed side losing, which some Americans cheered. American soldiers were slandered as crazy baby-killers, though there is no evidence that the American soldier’s experience in Vietnam was substantially different from the experience of the American soldier in any war. That led some Vietnam-era soldiers to refuse to admit they were veterans, until relatively recently.

After the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, we got worldwide peace, or so it seemed for all of one year, until Saddam Hussein decided Iraq wasn’t large enough and annexed Kuwait. A decade after Operation Desert Storm, a group of Saudi Arabians who hated what we Americans are hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001, ultimately igniting one war and reigniting another.

So today the U.S. is basically out of Iraq and getting out of Afghanistan, without assurance that those two countries won’t devolve into chaos once the Americans leave for good. The world is not a less dangerous place, with Iran threatening to nuke Israel, Russia wanting to reassert itself and not as our friend, and our impotent leaders, twice elected by the American voter, unable or unwilling to do anything about it. (Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel were veterans? How can you tell?) We’re losing a second Cold War against an ideology that feels free to kill non-Muslims as well as Muslims who don’t adhere to their perverted view of their own religion.

At this point, veterans might ask themselves why they served at all, if this is how their civilian leaders were going to treat their service. The answer is in what I’ve written around the other two Veterans Days, Memorial Day (which has kind of become a gumbo of the first weekend of summer, the U.S. answer to Latin America’s Day of the Dead, and the early Veterans Day) and Independence Day. Those who served their country in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force or Coast Guard served, and those who died for their country died, for the things, great and small, that make up our way of life. That can be as great as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and they can be as small as summer picnics and Independence Day fireworks displays. Past veterans served, present soldiers serve, and future members of the armed services will serve for those same things, whether they volunteered to serve, or got an invitation to serve in the mail from Uncle Sam. (For Facebook readers, read this along that line.)

The term “veteran” is said to define someone, active-duty, reserve, discharged or retired, who upon enlistment wrote a blank check to made payable to “The United States of America,” for an amount up to and including his or her life. That includes veterans who served during comparatively peaceful periods of our nation’s history — for instance, the years between the end of the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Shield, the ramp-up to Operation Desert Storm. The point is not that those veterans saw no combat (though tell that to those soldiers sent to Lebanon in the 1980s or Grenada in 1983); they were trained and willing to serve, wherever that might take them, and however that might have ended. That’s why thanking a veteran for his or her service today is the least you can do.

You may hear, or have heard, a speaker today wish for a day where there will be no need for, if not a Veterans Day, then a Memorial Day. That day will never arrive. That’s because, in addition to the evidence of the first few paragraphs of this blog, since the days of Cain and Abel, man has been a violent animal willing to fatally settle his disputes. There will always countries who want to invade and take over or destroy their weaker neighbors. As long as the United States exists, there will always be at least one enemy who opposes everything the United States stands for. War is something to be avoided, unless you can’t.