A wise old Marine told me one day that war follows you home. No matter how tough you are or how emotionally healthy and mentally stable you might be, if you've ever been in armed combat, war trots behind you for the rest of your life, a skulking wolf of remembrance. We were in Korea. He had fought in the South Pacific in World War II and was called up again to participate in the mountain battles that were tearing the Asian Peninsula apart. His name was Cpl. Charlie something, and there was a great weariness about him. He thought he had been done with war and there he was, sitting on the edge of a foxhole thousands of miles from home trying to figure out how twice he had been injected into harm's way. I thought of him on Veterans Day. He was more philosophical than most of us, an 'old man' of 30 among a bunch of 20-year-olds who considered him something akin to an ancient mariner. It was just that he knew more about the effects of war when one is home and thinks he's done with all of the terror. Charlie had been a part of the brutal island-hopping campaigns that sent the Marines storming ashore and then had experienced the aftermath when he came home again between wars. He had nightmares that caused him to wake up screaming and suffered the inability to be in a darkened room. Everyone said that he ought to relax, it was over, but he knew it wasn't, because it never is. Once the wolf of war hunts you down, he's always there right behind you, encouraged by the fact that after being home for a while Charlie had to fight again, this time in Korea. I came home thinking I was in pretty good shape, but I kept flashing back on incidents of combat that left me anxious and uncomfortable: a young Marine afire with a mortar's white phosphorous, screaming his life away; a good friend alive and laughing one minute and dead the next, caught in midsentence by a sniper's bullet. And others, many others. Back home, I couldn't walk on a mountain trail without watching for imaginary mines; I couldn't sleep in an enclosed tent; I wanted desperately to be holding a rifle when sunset began to melt into night, a time when the enemy often chose to attack. Sixty years later I can still hear the baying of the wolf behind me and guess I always will. The kinds of memories that plague the mind flash into view night or day: We are victims of ordinary incidents transformed into extraordinary mental images of war and its horror. I wish Veterans Day were renamed Peace Day and our energies directed toward ending war for all time rather than celebrating its warriors and the wolves that trail behind them. 