This country is full of men and women like him.

There’s a soldier who does hydrotherapy (PT in the water) at the same time as I do.

I see him every week. He wears his unit’s signage on his tshirt- wide feathered wings press across his back.

The water is warm, holding us both.

He moves slowly, each step sending ripples across the pool.

Sometimes he splashes me accidentally, and I nullify my irritation and marvel at his show of recovery and just wipe the water off my face.

I don’t know his name.

I don’t know what brought him there - a moment on the front line, a blast, a fall, a wound that changed everything.

I can tell he’s injured.

This country is full of men and women like him.

People who have given their time, their bodies, their very souls to protect this place.

People who carry whole chapters of our history in their muscles and their bones, in the parts of their hearts they don’t always get voiced aloud.

They’re everywhere.

They’re the person behind you at the checkout.

The quiet face across from you on the bus.

The man in the pool beside you, walking carefully through the water, every movement a conversation between pain and resilience.

The stories they carry aren’t always told.

They don’t arrive with captions or introductions.

They live silently, folded into the body, lingering in the way someone stands, or doesn’t.

In the way their eyes pause on nothing for a second too long.

In a flinch at the wrong noise or sudden movement.

We pass them every day, and we don’t know.

But still we need to hold it all in awareness. With gratitude. We cannot imagine the sacrifices they have made for us.

We can’t know.

But the ripples from their lives protect us all the same.