Military service requires sacrifice, and not necessarily the traditional one. It's been said that a veteran is someone who wrote a blank check to the United States for an amount up to and including his or her life, and that "up to" is a caveat loaded with forfeiture, both mental and physical. The training, transfers and deployments exact a toll all their own, to say nothing of the heavy, unpredictable and potentially ultimate demands of combat. It's a high cost - one that extends beyond military personnel to their loved ones as well.

Last Saturday, Give an Hour - a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing mental healthcare for our veterans and their families - together with the United Health Foundation unveiled a memorial stone at the Bethel Learning Center in Spanaway honoring the men and women who've given their lives in service to their country. Keynote speakers, veterans themselves or family members of veterans, spoke on the ways that military service impacted their lives.

Jay Brower, director of Community Connections for the Bethel School District, shared the story of his Uncle Dale, who carried a fellow soldier who was too sick to walk onto the shores of Okinawa in the waning days of World War II. Brower's uncle died in a foxhole a few days later, but the sickly soldier he carried didn't, and made his way to Brower's family after the war to tell them the story.

Allie Franklin, associate VP of Clinical Operations for health services provider Optum and an Air Force veteran, spoke of sleeping with a "go-bag" on-hand because a midnight phone call could send her halfway around the world at a moment's notice, and her family would have no idea where she'd gone.

Norma Melo, director of JBLM Youth Education Support Services, lost her husband Julian in Mosul, Iraq. Their children lost their father, and their little league team lost "the guy who always stopped at McDonald's on the way home whenever he drove the team van."

Volunteers from the Washington Department of Veterans Affairs, the Veterans Conservation Corps and The Mission Continues worked hard to beautify the grounds - pulling weeds, picking up litter and spreading beauty bark.

Given the constant downpour that day, you might expect that part of the event would be rescheduled, but the volunteers weren't about to be put off by a little rain.

Give an Hour and the Bethel School District considered several prospective sites for the memorial and beautification project before deciding on the Learning Center. "(Bethel and its school district) both take up such a huge amount of the area of the South Sound that serves JBLM," said Dr. Dug Lee, Project Coordinator for Give an Hour.  "The Learning Center is (...) a central place for the community, so it seemed like a really wonderful place to have a permanent memorial (...) and benefit the greater community."

The memorial stone is located just south of the Learning Center's main entrance.