And it’s easy to forget. We’re all guilty of that. And if we can occasionally go back and touched the stones of those who have laid there and given their fullest for our sake, it reminds us of the preciousness of what God’s given our country.

When we look at what we’ve just gone through in Iraq – despite that fact that we’ve taken out this terrible leader, they are not going to revert and become American. They are not going to have this precious gift of freedom and peace that we have in this country. That is a gift of God and it’s a special blessing and you don’t find it in many places in the world. As long as we cherish that and understand what it takes to preserve that, then this nation can continue.

But when we forget who it is that gave us that blessing, and when we decide that it’s not worth standing up and defending, then we will lose it. What has happened in so many places around the world will happen to us. So I think it’s something of a way of passing on the torch of freedom of one generation to the next as we remember that and those who have become before us.

Crosswalk.com: It seems fitting to discuss your new book as we approach Veterans Day. Can we start by talking about how faith and war can coexist?

O’Leary:  This was kind of a follow-up book to my first one (Taking the High Ground). But in this book we really tried to take people on the edge of the battlefield. Give them a real sense of “Here it is in the darkest hours of people’s lives, in what I call the hours of desperate prayers.” Where is God when the blue skies disappear and are covered with red skies of war? That was kind of my theme, you know, from Francis Scott Key talking about “the rocket’s red glare.”

When the blue skies are blown away by the angry winds of war what happens to people’s faith? How do you live through those dark times? We’re certainly doing that in the last couple of years in this nation. And we see that in Iraq, where even in what should be peace, you have these angry incidents. Or like when I was a peacekeeper in Israel, there were shootings and car bombings and different things like that. What about the people’s faith in those times?