"To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors," says Judith Markelz, director of the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio.

After 10 years of war, says Georgetown University professor Nancy Sherman, US troops are coming home from Iraq, “and now they see that whole project of stability and democratization unraveling. They come home carrying heavy, invisible wounds, of a sense of betrayal and PTSD. Was it worth it?”

Some chaplains have seen and ministered to so many dying or badly wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan they themselves have become casualties.

“The people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told,” says Professor Catherine Lutz of Brown University.

This week Congress authorized a new memorial at Arlington National Cemetery to honor 13 fallen Jewish military chaplains.

No one should think intervention in Libya will be easy or simple, writes religious studies professor Charles Mathewes. "Obama’s message to the nation was a reminder that he surely doesn't."

See and hear some of the observances this year at Arlington National Cemetery and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"Part of what's in a pilgrim's heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey," says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed's Warrior Transition Brigade.

As major combat operations come to an end and the US completes a troop drawdown in Iraq, revisit interviews with ethicists, philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders about just war and the moral issues raised by Iraq.

"Part of what's in a pilgrim's heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey," says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed's Warrior Transition Brigade.