I was thinking, on Memorial Day, about the glad-handing politician during the last campaign who asked me if I was a veteran. When I answered yes, he went on and on about how much the country appreciated the sacrifice I had made.

This struck me as strange after 40-some years since my discharge. No one had ever said that to me. Further, I never expected to hear it. During my youth, every able-bodied male was expected to serve his country in the military, unless you had a rich and powerful daddy who could protect you from the draft.

In our present unending war, unlike the Vietnam era, a great deal of gratitude is expressed for returning warriors.

After Desert Storm a Vietnam veteran said to me, “These guys had a cakewalk, eating Big Macs and Kentucky Fried Chicken, camping out in the desert, while the fighting was done electronically. We came home from Nam pariahs; they return to parades and cheers.”

Certainly, present-day veterans deserve our gratitude. Perhaps they have had it hardest of all. In Vietnam, draftees were cycled once though the war zone to spread out the pain. Our volunteer military is deployed again and again, battling, probably, across a decade.

Gratitude is called for, but behind much of it I hear more than gratitude. I hear guilt. Guilt about the shoddy way our Vietnam veterans were received. In Vietnam, our soldiers bore arms not by choice but from a universal requirement by our government. Soldiers were performing a duty, and they did not return to parades and cheers. They were sometimes transported from their arrival point in buses with blackened windows so that they couldn’t see the protesters’ accusing signs.

And years later, one of the main architects of that war, Robert McNamara, wrote in his biography that the war had been a mistake. Not the soldiers’ mistake, but the policymakers’ mistake — the guys at the top. Yet it was the returning soldier who represented that mistake for many, a mistake that most of the American people saw long before their leaders did.

We are and should be grateful and proud of our present day veterans. But behind some of the often-expressed gratitude I hear not only guilt for the way our country treated our returning veterans from Vietnam, but also this: “Thank you, volunteer. Your willingness to take on the burden spares my child from harm’s way. For this, I feel the greatest gratitude.”

Henry Hamilton lives in Otisfield.