Okay, Mr. Kelley, everything looks good. We'll send this package to Boston, and you should be hearing from us in a few days." I thanked the sailor an… - Thomas G. Kelley

As I stared at the grass under which my great-grandfather was buried, a single question ran through my mind: Was it worth it? The same question strikes me every time I visit the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., that honors the 58,000 who died in one of the longest and most controversial wars in the history of this country. Although 620,000 lives were lost in the Civil War, it brought us the emancipation of slaves and the preservation of the Union. There is no similar weighty statement I can make for the Vietnam War.

I downplayed the fact that I was a Medal recipient until recently. I was too busy being a naval officer, and I certainly did not want to let having the Medal of Honor give me any special advantage when it came to accomplishing certain things, okay? I bent over backward to avoid that, so I ended up downplaying the Medal completely. But now I found that it does permit me to have doors opened here in the state of Massachusetts to help veterans, and for that reason alone I am probably more active than I used to be.

I've found in this job something I never stopped to think about before: Someone who serves in the military has no control over whether there's a war or no, so this state and all states treat their wartime vets different from how they treat their peacetime vets, which I think is fundamentally unfair. I'm trying to get that changed, so that anybody who serves is treated the same way when it comes to benefits. The Cold War was won by men and women who were not considered wartime veterans, tracking their subs, doing sonar, playing cat-and-mouse type of games.