COEUR d’ALENE — The shirt Linda Straub wore Friday was 30 years old.

To her, it was ageless.

“I love wearing this shirt,” she said during the Veterans Day ceremony at McEuen Park’s Veterans Memorial. “Veterans Day is very important to me.”

Straub’s red, white and blue shirt read “Operation Desert Storm,” and “These Colors Don’t Run.”

She and husband Jim Straub, who served with the Navy and with the Air National Guard, stood side by side, joined by about 50 people at the event put on by American Legion Post 14 on a sunny, 28-degree morning.

The short ceremony included a speech from veteran Dee Sasse, a flyover by a B-25 out of Felts Field in Spokane, and two songs sung by veteran Darryl Heisey.

The Straubs’ son, Jeffrey Straub, served with the military during the Iraq War. Linda Straub said he suffered from PTSD and in 2009 committed suicide.

“Our son wasn’t on active duty when he died, so we were not a Gold Star Family,” she said.

But that changed during a recent visit to the USS Idaho nuclear-powered submarine.

U.S. Navy Cmdr. Nick Meyers, the first skipper of the USS Idaho, presented the Straubs with a gold pin that had Meyers' name and the words, Esto Perpetua, which means “Let it be perpetual.”

Straub pulled the pin from her purse and proudly displayed it.

“He gave me this and said, ‘Now you’re a Gold Star Family,’” she said, smiling.

Keynote speaker Sasse served 22 years in the Coast Guard.

“Saving lives, protecting our shores and ensuring safety and security on the high seas,” she said.

She loved her time in the military.

“If they would let me do it again, right now, I would,” she said.

Sasse said everyone was at the Veterans Day ceremony for a common reason.

“Today we honor all veterans who unselfishly placed their lives on the line for our freedom, those men and women who were ordinary people, just like you and me, until they heard the call to duty, and they answered it," she said.

Sasse said the freedom Americans enjoy is “extremely special. That’s why we must defend it every day.”

But that responsibility doesn’t just fall to the military.

“Each of us shares that duty,” she said, adding that can be done by simply voting and speaking out against injustice.

Coeur d’Alene resident Norman Oss, known locally as "The Stickman," served with the Army in 1967 and 1968 as a tank driver in the Vietnam War. He was 18 years old, turning 19 in Vietnam.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “I was just a young kid back then. We lost a lot of guys over there. Young men. Young boys.”

Oss wore a hat that said he was a survivor of the TET Offensive, which was a series of North Vietnamese attacks. He was wearing his dog tags for the first time in 54 years.

Oss said being in the Vietnam War, having someone shoot at him, “was tough.”

“For a young kid who has never been away from home, all of the sudden to be put into a situation where there are lots of things happening, sometimes boring, sometimes the adrenaline is flowing so fast you can’t even believe you’re there," he said.

When he came home, there was no parade. No cheers.

“The country didn’t accept us, didn’t want us, pissed on us, basically,” he said. "Nobody wanted the soldiers around.”

Today, it’s different. Active military are appreciated and veterans are honored.

“I think the Vietnam vets changed that,” Oss said. “It’s not that we needed parades. We needed somebody to say welcome home. We never got that.”