Staff photo / Ed Runyan... Joseph Illencik Jr., left, national director of the Catholic War Veterans, and Phil Markowitz of the Catholic War Veterans salute during the laying of the wreath ceremony Tuesday at the Mahoning County Veterans Memorial monument on Central Square.

YOUNGSTOWN — PRIDE is a useful word to talk about service in the American military branches, retired U.S. Air Force veteran J. Lori Stone, a longtime volunteer at the Youngstown Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic, said Tuesday.

“Looking around this room, we all served in different branches, but we are all proud of the branch or branches we served in,” she said as she looked around the rotunda of the Mahoning County Courthouse during the Mahoning County Veterans Day ceremony.

“The P stands for being proud to serve our country, to help defend the democracy that we are blessed to have in this country,” she said. “With God, country and family, we can do almost anything.”

She said the R stands for regulations, she said. “Look at all the regulations we had to go through,” she said. It seemed like a lot, but “it helped us to grow and understand that we were part of a team — that we were not going to be in it alone,” she said. “The military became our family.”

“The I is another great word that we got used to,” she said. “Inspections. Every time you had an inspection, you knew they were going to find something. But it worked. Because those inspections kept us on our toes, and helped us grow,” she said.

“The D stands for duty stations,” she said. “We were assigned to various duty stations because we had a mission. We were serving our country. And a lot of you were probably wondering why am I at this location? What that duty station was, was a great puzzle. How many people does it take to oversee what the values of the United States stand for?” she asked.

“It took each and every one of us as part of that puzzle, the different places we were assigned, the various deployments they had us going on. That was part of the big puzzle,” she said.

“The E stood for education,” she said. Not only did the military provide training to help them grow, but the GI Bill provided opportunities to earn a degree, she said.

Stone said her mother knew in 1965 when Stone graduated from Austintown Fitch High School, that Stone wanted to join the military. But at that time, a woman “was not legal until age 21. A man could go in at 18, but a woman had to have somebody sign for them,” she said.

“When my dad found out my mother was going to sign for me, that day that the recruiter came to pick me up to go to Cleveland for Lackland Air Force Base, I think my parents had the biggest fight they ever had in their marriage,” she said.

Her mother’s support for what Stone wanted to do “gave me my start,” she said. She and her husband had a daughter, and she had to leave the military. But she used the GI Bill to get a year of college in Texas. Then the GI Bill was extended, and allowed her to continue her education and graduate from Youngstown State University.

She gives credit to her mother and brother for believing in her. “My mother knew I loved the military, so she and my brother became legal guardians (for Stone’s two daughters), so I could go back into the military,” she said.

It shows how important the support of family is to having a successful career in the military. “It only takes one person. You may be having a bad day. But it’s that one person who believes in you and is proud of what you’re doing.”

She said she is not in the military anymore. “But each and every one of us has it in our hearts — that military is always going to be in our hearts. We’re all proud to have served.”

Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day. It was remembered as the time when hostilities ended World War I at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, when the armistice, or peace agreement with Germany, went into effect, according to the program for Tuesday’s Mahoning County Veterans Day ceremony.

The New York City Veterans Day Parade is the oldest and largest in the country with the first one held in 1919. The Veterans Day Moment of Silence Act was passed in 2016, and President Barack Obama signed it into law. At 2:11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time each Veterans Day, the president orders a moment of silence lasting two minutes, the program states.

On Veterans Day, be sure to thank a veteran for their service and “even better, strike up a conversation about what they did when they were in uniform,” the program, by the Mahoning County Veterans Service Commission, states.