She cocked her head. Clearly she wasn't buying my bullshit. "We all serve, in our way. You saved the world. I talked to my parents on the phone last night, and my father broke down crying, he was so relieved that we're not under the thumb of the lizards. My father is the toughest man I know; he was an Army Ranger, lost a leg below the knee in Afghanistan. They said he would never be able to walk right again, he gutted it out and qualified for infantry duty eighteen months later. He qualified, and served, with half a leg. Toughest man I know, and he was crying, talking to me. He told me he thought we humans were never going to be anything but slaves, if we survived. Now we have hope again, and that is not thanks to anything we did down here. It's because of the miracle of you appearing in orbit, and vaporizing those lizard motherfuckers, however the hell you did it. So," she took a deep breath and scowled at me, "Sergeant, is there anything I can do for you?"

I got it. It wasn't about me. I remembered something I'd heard from a guy who was been awarded the Medal of Honor; wearing the Medal isn't something you do for yourself. It makes people awkward around you, and it makes you uncomfortable, and it puts a barrier between the awardee and everyone else.

And it's not only the Medal of Honor, it's any medal awarded for valor in combat. You don't wear a medal for yourself. You wear it for the guys who didn't make it. You wear it for your unit, for your Service, for your country. It's not about you, it's about the people who award the medal to you. It's about their need to express gratitude for your actions in a tangible way. Staff Sergeant Kendall needed a way to feel she'd done something, anything, for me, to give back for whatever I'd done.

It wasn't about me, no matter how uncomfortable I was with attention and ceremonies. I didn't want a medal, and I didn't-