Southampton - Seventy percent of today's service members throughout the United States military joined within the last 12 years. From today's Captains down to the newest Private, the identity of our service members that have grown up within today's military system has been completely shaped and transformed from the Global War on Terrorism.

Our all volunteer military was turned upside down dramatically as tactics, training, procedures and equipment had to be redone and changed, much of it on the fly. Improvisation became a staple as no longer could units look to manuals or higher levels of command for every answer. The word "Readiness" was found everywhere; posters, operation orders, briefings, status reports, speeches. This word took on a whole new level of meaning as it didn't mean a poor evaluation report during a training exercise like in the past, it meant that someone could be killed or seriously injured during the next combat deployment if you didn't achieve it.

Rarely can a generation pinpoint an event or individual that has had such an enormous impact on day to day life. 9/11 surely impacted our country's psyche. It brought about a sense of vulnerability that we hadn't felt in quite some time. Friends and families of the victims of that day were changed forever as they tried to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives and tried to make sense of this tragedy.

During times of great strain and anguish, the best medicine is to keep moving. We as a nation slowly went back to work, school and play, we had to drive on with our daily lives. As we moved towards a sense of normalcy, our old lives, young men and women in uniform found themselves moving towards a new life all together.

Osama bin Laden was the needle point for this great shift of what is considered "normal" for our service members. His organization's actions and our country's response brought about a sharp realization for these men and women that they would be spending much of their adult lives away from home in the middle of a desert or on a mountaintop in far away, strange, alien lands. Kissing and embracing their loved ones, holding onto a long gaze into each other's eyes, fighting back the baseball sized lump in their throat, turning away to board an airplane where a psychological change occurs. As the seat belts clicks they put away their mother, father, sister, brother, son, or daughter hat and dawn their warrior hat. This has become an annual event, a "normal" event.

As pundits continue to debate about the big picture significance of bin Laden's death, uniformed men and women will continue too with their "normal" life of training, boarding planes and fighting. Big picture ideas and sound bites make for great television, but rarely do these topics really make any difference at the ground level, the grit of our lives. We may define this moment as the last sentence in this chapter of our country's story.

We have the luxury of turning the page and moving on with the story. For those who bear our flag on the right shoulder of their uniform the last sentence hasn't been read by them yet. They still have the page dog eared, waiting to be finished later.