Remember the unsung Cold War vets as some recall the fall of the Berlin Wall

Most of the world is marking this week the fact that twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell, a time when millions of freedomloving people forced an end to their socialist governments, when an empire fell and the Cold War ended. When we're saluting veterans as we are right now, it's easy to overlook those of us who served throughout the Cold War, before and after the wars in Korea and Viet Nam. Cold War veterans stood toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and Red China working to prevent a worldwide thermonuclear war, from which there would have been left nothing but smoldering scraps. We won that war by preventing war, a distinction few other veterans have.

As a veteran of the Cold War, I was lucky enough to witness some of these events up close. I knew I was in the middle of history when I was part of a mission to photograph the first U.S. Navy warships to visit a Soviet port since 1946. Aboard a cruiser and a destroyer, sailors visited the Soviet Black Sea Fleet's home in Sevastopol in August before the Wall fell, and we Americans were surprised to find that we were welcomed with open arms by the Russian people.

Thousands of ordinary Russians were on the pier to welcome us and take us home, feed us and show us their city. "Let our leaders fight, we all love Americans," they told us. Their city had been closed since World War II, and now it was opening up - their first taste of freedom. They saw their neighboring Eastern European countries breaking free from the chains of communism and socialism, and they knew their time was coming soon.

Although all the Russians in Sevastopol wanted to talk about America, they didn't want to talk politics. They wanted me to tell them about being free to travel, free to go and do, and freedom to shop. Especially shop.

As they hosted us and toasted us in their tiny socialist apartments, the Russian families wanted to know all about America. They had heard that we had big stores, full of food and fresh vegetables, and short checkout lines - the opposite of their empty stores and long lines. "Look me in the eyes and tell me," they'd say.

"I'll know you're telling the truth." So I told them, looked them in the eyes, and they knew it was the truth.

After I'd told in great detail how my wife shopped vast supermarkets full of fresh food and short lines, they marveled at the glories of the American marketplace. In socialist states, they told me, one family member had to spend all day in lines just to get enough bread, potatoes and meat for the family that day. My words allowed them to dream that the bountiful shelves of freemarket capitalism might soon come to them.

So, 20 years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, along with the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact and the threat of worldwide nuclear war. The people rejected the failed socialist state and chose freedom. This week, we salute the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have served and are serving, no matter when or where you served. I salute those remaining veterans of WWII, Korea, and no less Viet Nam and Iraq, and the veterans, too, of that great Cold War, the peace we won through strength I join the freedom-loving people of the world in celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Wall. I just wish I knew why U.S. President Barack Obama chose not to join his peers in Berlin for the celebration. Perhaps he does not see free peoples' victory over socialism something to be celebrated.