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November 11, 2003

10:23 AM Veteran’s DayIt’s Veteran’s Day — hope you’re enjoying it one way or the other: Having the day off, going to a parade, visiting a veteran … for us here at the Digest we’ll spend the day thinking about veterans of all stripes. Including those actors who served in the armed forces….Like Robert S. Woods (Bo, OLTL), who served in Vietnam with the Green Berets. Digest spoke to him last year about his experience, which he says was probably not like many others’ — “It’s a memory,” he notes. “I don’t wake up having nightmares. My experience over there wasn’t nightmarish. I got scared a couple of times, but I wasn’t put in a situation where I had to do anything heroic.”But, he remembers, the reception he and his fellow soldiers received upon their returns from overseas was typical, and typically unfortunate: “That was a bit of a mess. People weren’t too happy to see us. They reacted badly to the vets. I only had one instance where a woman didn’t want her child — she told this little girl, ‘Don’t look at that man,’ at the airport. I was just trying to get home, I was on my way home to take the suit off. I think after a period of time, people look back on it and more has come out about decisions that were made, problems they had, political problems they had over there.”He adds that post-9/11 he began to feel a resurgence of patriotism, and adds, “I’m pretty patriotic.” So much so that he asked wardrobe if he could wear a small American flag pin on the lapel of Bo’s jacket. “I don’t know if you can be too patriotic,” he says. “Though you can be too anything, I guess….”

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