I still wear my dog tags, though it’s been 20 years since I got out of the Army.

I have a duffle bag in the closet, packed full of uniforms and gear, and sometimes when I’m feeling nostalgic I put on the boots they issued me in Basic Training.

They’re still the best shoes I’ve ever had.

In my hometown, in the generation of my uncles, sometimes they were the first shoes some men had ever had. In my hometown, above the fireplace mantles, you usually see the framed photographs of men in uniform.

And 20 years ago this week I took my uniform off. It had been four years of pain in the neck and I was glad to have it over. I was glad to be free and getting on with life.

But in life sometimes you look back, and sometimes it takes distance to get perspective. And everything in the rearview mirror tends to take on a rosy glow.

And so it is that, all these years later, I miss and love the Army in a way I couldn’t have imagined at the time. I have, with the maturity of later life, come to see what a privilege it was to wear the uniform of the United States. I have realized with time that I did not serve my country, it served me. I gave the Army nothing, it gave me everything.

I’ve been out 20 years, and I miss it more every day.

Next to Billy Shu’s restaurant, a couple of blocks away from where I worked at a little afternoon newspaper and maybe a mile or so from where I played records on the radio, was the Army recruiting office. A thin man named Sergeant Barber worked there. To give him a thrill, and to tick off my bosses, I’d play “Ballad of the Green Beret” every afternoon after the 5 o’clock news.

I’d been sent over there by my editor at the paper. I had stumbled into newspapering and found that I really liked it but that my lack of a college education meant I likely had no future in it. My editor had worked at “Stars & Stripes” during Vietnam and he said that the Army had a pretty good journalism program and that it might be a way to get ahead.

I thought about that for a while, but didn’t do anything about it.

Then my wife got pregnant and that raised some issues about how to pay for having a baby and how to provide for our little family.

Sergeant Barber told me that in the Army you could have babies for free. A couple of Tuesdays later I sat in Buffalo at the MEPS in front of a computer screen looking for a journalist slot. When we were done I had signed a contract and raised my arm to the square.

That day I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and every day still I consider myself gladly bound by that oath.

Basic Training was hard, but doable. Back then they could really make it rough on you, and they did. But it was a wonderful education and a priceless experience. Nowhere else in my life have I dealt with men I ended up admiring or trusting more than our drill sergeants.

In basic, I learned to be physically tough. I learned that the human body has few true limitations and that weakness and inability are almost always attitudes, not realities. In basic, I never dropped out of a run or failed to accomplish what I was ordered to do.

And I only got in trouble once.

There was this kid from Puerto Rico who got targeted right away because he had a lisp and a master’s degree. This one drill sergeant rode him hard, and after a few weeks it got beyond the riding that makes a weak man strong, and got into pointless cruelty, almost into a psychological torture. And one day in a line for something the drill sergeant was on him and the kid was crying and while we all stood there at parade rest I said, “OK, that’s enough.”

Out loud. In a world where you didn’t speak unless spoken to, where you were what the dog left on the lawn, I raised my voice and said, “OK, that’s enough.”

I don’t know where that came from, and I don’t know where I got the ability to do the 400 pushups he kept tacking on in multiples of 50. He screamed and spit and threatened and shoved and if the company commander hadn’t come along I don’t know how far it would have gone.

But that night the first sergeant called me into his office and shook my hand.

The Army, like most government jobs, is a system, and if you’re smart you play the system. If you don’t, the system plays you. I had enlisted with an assignment to go to Hawaii. Sergeant Barber said it would be fun in the sun. Once I was in the Army, however, I learned it would be the 25th Infantry Division and four years of camping in the jungle. No fun, no sun, lots of nasty.

And no real journalism, which is why I had enlisted in the first place.

So once I got out of basic and into my training school, I asked around about how to get out of my Hawaii orders. One of the instructors said that if I got orders for jump school – paratrooper training – that would trump the Hawaii orders and I’d be good to go.

So I volunteered for jump school.

Then I learned about life in the 82nd Airborne. Jump school would be great, shaving your head bald and wearing a funny beret was not, at the time, my idea of fun.

I say “at the time,” because in all the years since, my great regret is that I never earned Army jump wings. If there were any way, I’d go now. I kick myself and am ashamed.

But at the time I had a little baby and a wife who wanted a stable home and so, getting training at a little fort near Indianapolis, we decided to try to get my orders changed so that I could stay there. So I went to that post’s newspaper and volunteered. When I graduated from school and had some casual time, I stayed on working.

And at every opportunity I mentioned how much I wanted to stay. Which got this sergeant to talk to that major who asked for a moment with this colonel who mentioned it to that general who got my orders changed.

Two years later I came up on orders for Berlin. In those Cold War days, that was about as big an honor as a soldier could get, as the Berlin Brigade was considered a showpiece. But there was a second baby by then and I was doing very well at the post newspaper and I was focused on after-Army employment and so one day after I had MC’d a ceremony and the post commander came by to pat everybody on the back I mentioned to him that I’d sure hate to leave his command.

He said he’d have his sergeant major make a few calls and it turned out that I didn’t have to go to Berlin.

So, the Army gave me a chance to go to Hawaii, to be a paratrooper and belong to the storied 82nd Airborne Division, and to go to the Berlin Brigade, and I turned them all down to be a tie-wearing desk jockey at a little fort in Indiana.

I can’t tell you in the years since how much, from one standpoint, I have regretted that. I can’t tell you in the years since how much, from another standpoint, I have been grateful for that.

I went in the Army to learn a trade. I went in to learn how to be a newspaperman. I wanted to learn how to report and write, how to take pictures and develop them. I wanted to learn how to run a newspaper. And I was probably annoyingly insistent about those goals. I pushed and pushed and pushed.

And the Army gave me everything I wanted and more. Training, experience, the chance to spread my wings and experiment, to roll up my sleeves and do what I wanted to do. I know that it didn’t – and doesn’t – work out that way for everyone, and I had to finagle at every turn, but I worked hard and, though it never came easy, in the end the Army truly let me be all I could be.

It was sometimes maddening, and half the time the people above me were idiots, but the Army offered me a chance that I could have gotten nowhere else in life.

The notion of some people being officers and other people being enlisted, and of one class being in charge and the other class being subservient, I didn’t much like that. And like I said, some of the officers were absolute incompetents who would have been complete failures anywhere else but in the Army. Too often people let rank go to their head and substituted pettiness for leadership.

Quite often there were dirty political games and people and their careers were messed with for spite.

But that’s everywhere.

And that’s not what I primarily remember. Primarily, I remember that in the Army we mostly stuck together. If the world went to crap, you could always, at any time of the day or night, call your first sergeant and he would come bail you out – sometimes literally. If you didn’t know how to do something, if you were buried by the B.S., there was always someone there to show you a guiding hand.

The attitude of the best leaders – officer or enlisted – was that you always take care of your troops. That meant that, no matter what, the first priority is making sure your soldiers are OK and able to do their jobs and meet their needs. I saw that true selfless model of leadership demonstrated over and over.

In the Army, you were never alone. If you were up against it, whether it was personal or financial or professional, there’d be somebody else in combat boots who understood and would lend a hand. I loved that sense of belonging and brotherhood.

I also loved the fact that it was a merit-based society. You competed for promotions, you took tests – physical or mental – and you got ahead or fell behind exclusively on the basis of your own performance. In the Army, I saw people who, because of where they were born or the circumstances of their upbringing, would have had no real chance to show their abilities in the outside world, rise to the top on their talents. So many of the best sergeants and sergeants major were guys who’d come off the worst street corners in the worst cities of the country, places where death and failure were all around, and given a chance to excel had done so in stunning fashion.

I also loved being in an environment where the vast majority of people were constantly striving to be their best. There weren’t many sad sacks in the Army where I was. It was mostly people who took their Army careers seriously and who were proud of what they stood for and what they were accomplishing. I was mostly around soldiers who were striving to be excellent, and their positive spirit inspired me.

Consistant with my plan, the last year I was in the Army was focused on finding a job for after I got out. I wrote to newspapers across the country, focusing on the Midwest and a series of papers that were the dominant ones in their state. Response was good, and I had much professional good fortune, in and out of the Army, and with two months left I went on terminal leave to begin my new civilian job.

It was at a metropolitan daily newspaper. I had gotten over the hurdle of no college education. I had gotten exactly where I had hoped to get when I went down and talked to Sergeant Barber. The Army gave me everything I wanted.

I served under Ronald Reagan, I rose to be a corporal, and I got sent home with an Army Achievement Medal, an Army Commendation Medal and a Meritorious Service Medal.

And a lifetime’s pride at being able to say I am a veteran of the United States Army.

And when this life is over, when it’s time to lay me beneath the sod of my hometown, the last thing they will do – the last honor I will receive on this earth – is lift the American flag off my casket. The same flag I swore my oath in front of, the same flag that floated over the post headquarters each day I was in, the same flag my children pledge allegiance to.

I think that’s a pretty good deal.

I spent four years in the service, and have spent the last 20 years coming to understand what that means. I have spent the last 20 years with an ever-keener sense of gratitude for the privilege I had of wearing the uniform of my country.

I gave America four years, and I am in its debt.

ST. PAUL – This afternoon I'll get on a plane and go home. After two weeks, the conventions are done and it's time to stop living in motel rooms.

No more delegates, no more protesters, no more early morning cab rides through streets I don't recognize.

I'm going home.

Politically, nothing has changed.

I've listened to all the speeches, read all the press releases, swallowed all the talking points.

And I'm going home exactly as I came, only more so. I think that's how it works. People are seldom persuaded by political conventions, though they are often energized. You renew your passion and reinvigorate your rationale. Democrats become better Democrats and Republicans become better Republicans.

You hear the other guys, and are more certain that they are wrong. You hear your guys, and are more certain that they are right.

And that's the way it should be. If a speech or two causes you to shift your basic philosophical foundation, you didn't have a basic philosophical foundation. In life you are allowed one major change. Much beyond that and you're flaky.

I enjoyed the conventions.

The people were wonderful. The host cities were gracious. The accommodations were comfortable. The Democrats had a happy, joyous spirit. The Republicans had a patriotic, moving spirit.

Talk Show Row is a series of temporary tables, lined up end to end, each one topped with a couple of microphones and a piece of electronic equipment and some headphones. Some have five or six people clustered around, others just one. Many have banners proudly proclaiming their station or their host's name.

I was usually the second show to go on the air. In Denver some guy from New York City was already on when I arrived. In St. Paul it was a syndicated show from back east. Both of them were liberal and both of them spoke pretty loud and instead of the dead silence of a radio studio it was the clatter of Babel, getting steadily louder as morning spread from east to west and more shows went on the air.

At its peak, about midday, there would be dozens of voices, some of them competing for preeminence in a roomful of egos and echoes.

At full swing, press agents trolled the room, representing potential guests, politicians or activists who wanted to be on the air. The good guests they protected from hosts, who called to them to be interviewed. The bad guests they pushed on hosts, who feared their shows would sound dull. Most of the business was done in the middle, in that gray area where the ratio of good versus bad was anyone's guess.

Which is how I came to have David Keith on the show.

I didn't know who he was either. He just walked in the room and I knew he was the guy who killed himself in “An Officer And A Gentleman.” The day before I had had my picture taken with Lou Gossett Jr. and I felt like I could get the daily double.

David Keith turned out to be the greatest guy. He runs cattle now, in the South, and he came to the Democratic convention lobbying for a crackdown on child pornographers. He was a happy and engaging man.

I also got Jon Voight and Chuck Schumer, but I had to be rude to do it. In both instances my technique involved jumping up and shouting, “Would you like to say hello to Rochester?” as they passed.

And all the big ones passed.

In the rows of stations, most were from big cities, like Los Angeles and Boston and New York. Salt Lake and Rochester were just about at the bottom of the pecking order. If your town didn't have an NFL team or a World Series banner, the good guests just walked on by.

Which left me snapping pictures of a lot of famous people as they hurriedly walked past my microphones.

Except for Katie Couric.

By some fluke of my boss knows somebody, Katie Couric came to sit at my humble table. For five minutes I asker her, in very serious tones, very serious questions. All the while I was thinking, “Dang, she is a good looking woman.”

Which is maybe why my career as an interviewer has gone almost nowhere. I think about stuff other than the questions I'm asking.

Like Katie's good looks.

And Leo Thorsness's good heart.

I was sitting on Talk Show Row, working on the premise that America desperately needed to know what I thought about geothermal energy, when a man walked by with a Medal of Honor around his neck. I went to a commercial and chased him down.

My first question was, “May I talk to you on the radio?” and my second question was, “Who are you?”

It was Leo Thorsness. Lieutenant Colonel Leo Thorsness. He was a POW with John McCain. He became a POW when a MiG popped up over a mountaintop and put a missile through his plane. It was him and his backseat man and, by prior agreement, as soon as it looked like things were over, they pulled the ejection seat.

Being thrown into the wind at 700 miles an hour tore his helmet off and ripped the pockets from his flight suit and broke both his knees to the side. He snagged 40 feet up in the jungle and dropped to the ground on a rope and tried, with his useless legs, to crawl away and hide.

Moments before as he'd plummeted under the tattered parachute and seen the muzzle flash of men on the ground trying to shoot him, he knew that within 10 minutes he would either be dead or captured.

That's when he heard the voice of God.

As he began to pray, falling from the sky, he heard a voice, over and over, “You're going to get through this, Leo. You're going to get through this.”

They had a tapping code, through the thick walls between their solitary cells. It was via that code that he learned from a newly downed airman that he had received the Medal of Honor.

And it was later, when they were pushed together into a large room, that a vote was taken to hold a weekly church service. The prisoners gathered and discussed it, knowing that they would be punished, and the highest ranking among them asked each man to speak. They voted unanimously to worship and on the following Sunday morning the senior ranking officer called them to attention and began to lead them in the Lord's Prayer.

The guards immediately ran in and violently knocked him to the ground, ordering the men to be silent, dragging the leader to the rooms where the Americans were tortured.

Before the first man was hauled out of the room, the second-ranking man stepped forward and called on the men to recite the Lord's Prayer. Soon rifles were swinging and the guards were punching and kicking with their heavy boots. The third man stepped forward when the second was felled. The fourth stepped forward when the third was attacked. As the fifth man stepped forward and called for the Lord's Prayer, with blood and broken men and mayhem all around, the man commanding the guards saw the futility of his efforts and the resolve of the Americans and he ordered his guards out of the room.

And the Americans stood there in formation and recited the Lord's Prayer.

And they did that each Sunday for the rest of their captivity.

I saw famous and powerful people. I saw some of the best people in the news and commentary business. I got to be a witness to history. I saw many people whose decency and work ethic inspired me. I got to know a neighborhood in Denver and a Denny's in St. Paul.

And tonight I get to go home.

I saw a lot of things, and count them all as blessings, but these are all I can write tonight.

Bob is in St.Paul for the Republican Convention.

ST. PAUL – The spirit here is patriotism.

That's what I feel. That's how it's registering for me.

That probably says more about me than it does about the Republican National Convention, and it shouldn't be confused with objective reporting, but it's been my defining sense.

This gathering on the banks of the mighty Mississippi, in the north of the American heartland, is rooted in a love of country. Even the convention motto – Country First – makes that point.

By contrast, the Democratic motto – Unity – spoke of something else, of chasing away internal party divisions and claiming a political victory.

And while the Democratic Party and its candidate said repeatedly last week that no one could question their patriotism, one could certainly question their definition of patriotism. It is clear that members of the two parties mean different things by the word.

They not only mean different things, they feel different things.

And I feel the patriotism of the Republicans. I don't disrespect the patriotism of the Democrats, I just don't understand it. No more than I believe they understae snd the patriotism I feel.

But here, amidst these people, the Republicans, I feel and understand their love of country. A love which is front and center in their thinking. They speak my language. Again, I am not disrespecting Democrats and their feelings for this country, but neither am I accepting their disrespect of the patriotism of the people at this convention and of people like me.

During my week at the Democratic National Convention, I saw one person – other than those who were going to be on national TV – who wore a flag pin. That person was a reporter. In my time at the Republican National Convention, I saw four people in the first hour who wore a flag pin. Those people were delegates and convention officials.

There may be no significance in that, but it is a difference, and it does catch your attention.

The patriotism of Republicans is most often tied to a belief in what is sometimes called American exceptionalism, the fact that America is different and better. It is a patriotism that says this is the greatest nation on earth – now or ever. It is a patriotism that believes that the answer to our problems is found inside our hearts, not outside our borders.

It is a patriotism that believes the interests of the United States of America trump everything else. We are not “citizens of the world,” there is no such thing. We are citizens of the United States, and we love our country with all our hearts – warts and all – and if you listen to what we say, we're talking about American strengths, not American weaknesses.

We believe America is the best thing that ever happened to the world. We believe that America is the good guy. We believe that America is right.

And when we see the flag, we get a lump in our throats.

And, to us, that's patriotism.

When Republicans put veterans on stage, it's to hear about their courage and goodness, to honor them as the heroes they are, it's not to declare them America's newest victims, damaged by war and abandoned by their homeland. When we put veterans on stage, it is to highlight strength and success, not to condemn the cause in which they and others have struggled.

That's ultimately the reason Republicans embrace John McCain. With John McCain, come hell or high water, you know he loves his country and you know he's going to defend it.

You know with John McCain, deep in his heart, where his soul lives, America is not equal to other nations, America is better than other nations. It's not about playing nice and selling out our interests, it's about making sure that America comes out on top.

And with John McCain, you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that if anyone ever dared raise a hand against the United States, he'd kill them. He'd kill them all.

He'd protect this land with his life. If push comes to shove, and any of the various bad guys in the world want a piece of the United States, John McCain would rip off their head and crap down their neck. He would be vicious and ruthless.

Which is how countries stay safe.

And the fear of John McCain will keep the world's bad guys at arm's length. Being completely honest, which candidate do you think Russia and Venezuela and Iran and China want to see elected?

The spirit here is patriotism.

It almost makes me choke up.

I don't mean that as a swipe at Democrats. They were wonderful people last week, and I can't question their patriotism. But neither can I understand it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that they are not good Americans, but that we define the word and the emotion differently.

The patriotism here is red, white and blue.

The patriotism here is America First.

The patriotism here is my kind of patriotism.

The kind that will keep America free and strong.