from this site:

Who Is He
He is profane and irreverent, living as he does in a world full of
capriciousness, frustration and disillusionment.
He is perhaps the best-educated of his kind in history,
but will rarely accord respect on the basis of mere degrees or titles.

He speaks his own dialect, often incomprehensible to the layman.
He can be cold, cruel, even brutal and is frequently insensitive.
Killing is his profession and he strives very hard to become even more skilled at it.

His model is the grey, muddy,
hard-eyed slayer who took the untakeable at Vimy Ridge,
endured the unendurable in the Scheldt and held the unholdable at Kapyong.

He is a superlative practical diplomat;
his efforts have brought peace to countless countries around the world.
He is capable of astonishing acts of kindness, warmth and generosity.
He will give you his last sip of water on a parched day and his last food to a hungry child;
he will give his very life for the society he loves.
Danger and horror are his familiars and his sense of humour is accordingly sardonic.
What the unknowing take as callousness is his defence against the unimaginable;
he whistles through a career filled with graveyards.

His ethos is one of self-sacrifice and duty.
He is sinfully proud of himself, of his unit and of his country
and he is unique in that his commitment to his society is Total.
No other trade or profession dreams of demanding such of its members
and none could successfully try.

He loves his family dearly,
sees them all too rarely and as often as not loses them to the demands of his profession.
Loneliness is the price he accepts for the privilege of serving.
He accounts discomfort as routine and the search for personal gain as beneath him;
he has neither understanding of nor patience
for those motivated by self-interest, politics or money.

His loyalty can be absolute, but it must be purchased.
Paradoxically, the only coin accepted for that payment is also loyalty.
He devours life with big bites, knowing that each bite might be his last
and his manners suffer thereby. He would rather die regretting the things
he did than the ones he dared not try. He earns a good wage by most
standards and, given the demands on him, is woefully underpaid.

He can be arrogant, thoughtless and conceited, but will spend himself,
sacrifice everything for total strangers in places he cannot even pronounce.
He considers political correctness a podium for self-righteous fools,
but will die fighting for the rights of anyone he respects or pities.

He is a philosopher and a drudge,
an assassin and a philanthropist, a servant and a leader, a disputer and a mediator,
a Nobel Laureate peacekeeper and the Queen's Hitman, a brawler and a healer,
best friend and worst enemy. He is a rock, a goat, a fool, a sage, a drunk, a
provider, a cynic and a romantic dreamer. Above it all, he is a hero for our time.

You, pale stranger, sleep well at night only because he exists for you,
the citizen who has never met him, has perhaps never thought of him
and may even despise him.
He is both your child and your guardian. His devotion to you is unwavering.

He is a Canadian Soldier.

Hell, he's any soldier of a true democracy. And he too is one of my brothers-in-arms.

And this, from I Love Jet Noise

What is a vet?

He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudia Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel.

He is the Nebraska farmer who worries every year that this time the bank really will foreclose.

He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 39th Parallel.

She - or he - is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.

He is the POW who went away one person and came back another - or didn't come back at all.

He is the Quantico drill instructor who never has seen combat - but who has saved countless lives by turning slouchy no-'counts into soldiers, and teaching them to watch each others' backs.

He is the parade-riding legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.

He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.

He is the anonymous hero in the Tomb of the Unknowns, whose presence at Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the other anonymous heroes whose valor died unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean's sunless deep.

He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket - palsied now and aggravatingly slow - who helped liberate a Nazi death camp, and who wishes all day long his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come.

He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being --a person who offered some of his life's most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs. He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known.