IHS student honors veterans with award-winning essay

Issaquah High School senior Rachel Chin experienced a life-changing moment when she encountered a homeless veteran while walking through a mall on the holiday designated in his honor a few years ago. She captured her experience in an essay entitled “My Role in Honoring our Veterans,” which has won the state Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Voice of Democracy contest.

Rachel won the district competition on January 5, earning a $50 savings bond, $150, and a plaque from the local VFW post. She won the state competition on January 19, earning $900, a plaque, and a $1,000 scholarship. Just as excitingly, the honor comes with an all-expense paid trip to Washington DC, where she will join all of the other state winners for a recognition ceremony that includes shaking hands with the President of the United States while spending a half hour talking to him in the Oval Office. At the national level, she will receive at least another $1,000 scholarship, and a top-three finish would come with $10,000, $15,000, or $30,000 scholarship.

In her essay, Chin says that to adequately honor our veterans we must experience every day to the fullest—“living wisely and well”—while being thankful to those who made our freedom and quality of life possible. Her essay states:

“So I tell America: enjoy the beauty of the mountains and the majest of the plains—for some who have returned no longer have eyes to see them with. Enjoy walking through the peace of the countryside or the bustling energy of the city—for there are some now who cannot walk at all. Enjoy family times, but remember the many whose Thanksgiving dinners came from a can. Enjoy a peaceful sleep with gentle dreams, but do so in the knowledge that there are many who cannot sleep, whose dreams are haunted by the faces and experiences they left behind in another land …” Read the entire essay.

More information about the VFW’s Voice of Democracy contest.