That big sigh you heard on Wednesday morning was the American public expressing relief that the billion-dollar two-year presidential election campaign that cost President-elect Barack Obama’s organization more than 10 bucks a vote for his roughly 65 million votes was finally history.

“Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with,” the American icon Will Rogers once said, and Obama’s losing challenger, John McCain, can vouch for that. The McCain campaign spent more than $6 for each of his 57 million votes. No matter. It was the finest election that money could buy, my possibly shaky math notwithstanding.

If you can think of ways in which a billion dollars could be better spent in these perilous economic times, you have lots of company as the long national hangover from Tuesday night’s party abates and the electorate gets back to business as usual.

The week that belonged to the candidates and the record numbers of Americans who cast their votes for president now gives way to a week in which the nation’s military veterans are honored.

It is fitting that Tuesday’s Veterans Day holiday will mark our first collective pause for reflection since the history-making events of election night. In large part it is because of the service and sacrifices of our veterans that we are guaranteed the freedom of expressing our preferences at the ballot box without fear of intimidation or recrimination. Not every citizen of the world is so fortunate.

And it is not only the freedom to vote that our veterans have safeguarded. In a celebrated World War II speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that people all over the world should be able to enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear, as Americans do.

The price for the so-called “Four Freedoms” was steep when Roosevelt made that speech, and it remains steep today. Ask any gold star mother who has lost a son or daughter to war. Or any Purple Heart veteran who left home whole and came back with limbs missing and perhaps memories too gruesome to share with other than the demons that periodically return to haunt his turf.

“Maybe they won’t talk at all when they finally get home. If they don’t, it will be because they know this is a world apart and nobody else could ever understand,” famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, beloved by World War II combat infantrymen, wrote from North Africa in 1943.

A world apart, indeed. One that nobody else could ever understand. Except for other combat veterans, of course. The worst experience of all, Pyle wrote in a 1944 dispatch from the Western Front, “is just the accumulated blur, and the hurting vagueness of too long in the lines, the everlasting alertness, the noise and fear, the cell-by-cell exhaustion, the thinning of the ranks around you as day follows nameless day. And the constant march into eternity of your own small quota of chances for survival …”

On this Veterans Day, the nation’s consciousness regarding veterans’ issues is heightened by simultaneous wars that seem to have dragged on forever. We lament the thinning of the ranks on new and nontraditional battlefields even as the obituaries in the daily newspaper tell us that the war drum throbs no longer for accelerating numbers of World War II and Korea vets. All too soon we will see the battle flags permanently furled with increasing frequency for veterans of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War.

During the just-concluded presidential campaign, both candidates pledged strong support for veterans. As president, John McCain – a former Navy pilot who endured more than five years in captivity as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam – likely would have placed a high priority on meeting the nation’s obligation to veterans who have upheld their part of the bargain to protect America’s interests.

As president-elect, Barack Obama will have a swell opportunity on Veterans Day to reassure veterans that his administration’s promised “change you can believe in” will include relegating their sometimes shoddy treatment to the scrap heap of history.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.