AIR FORCE AEF, QATAR 2003-2004 — The complicated relationship between an admin POG and the word 'valor'

I was a personnel specialist at Al Udeid during the OIF kickoff and through the first year. I processed mortuary affairs paperwork for a year. I did not see combat. I was not shot at. I have no valor device on anything. For twenty years I would not call myself a veteran in conversation. When civilians thanked me for my service I would mumble and change the subject. I had internalized a hierarchy: only the guys downrange in the dirt were real veterans, and the rest of us were support trash. That was my own internal voice, not anything anybody said. The thing that changed it was processing my own father's paperwork twenty-one years later — he died in 2024 — and looking at his DD-214 from Vietnam. He had been a clerk-typist at Long Binh. Same thing I had been. He had never let himself claim the title either. He died telling me he hadn't really served. I do not want my own kids to have that conversation about me. I served. I did the job the military told me to do at the place it told me to do it. I am a veteran. So was he. The hierarchy in my head was a lie I let myself believe for two decades. I am working on it.