By Hannah Kim

Tomorrow marks the 91st anniversary of the fateful hour that halted the fighting of more than 70 million men and women over 53 months.

Hence on the 11th hour (of the 11th day of the 11th month), millions of citizens worldwide will honor those who served in what U.S. President Woodrow Wilson hoped would've been the ``war to end all wars."

Originally celebrated as Armistice Day to commemorate the day of cease-fire of the Great War, the U.S. Congress under President Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Veterans Day in 1954 to salute the service of not merely WWI veterans, but veterans from all previous and post wars.

Over the course of my endeavor to pass the Korean War Veterans Recognition Act, Veterans Day has become one my favorite holidays. And this particular Veterans Day is one that is immensely more significant and stirring to me than any other.

First and foremost, it is to be a day of remembrance, symbolic of the past.

At 11a.m. during the Veterans Day National Ceremony at the Arlington National Cemetery, a color guard will pay tribute to fallen soldiers at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

The solemn procession will evoke the faces of these nameless men who sacrificed on my behalf. It will remind me to be grateful for my loving family and friends and appreciate what is.

More than anything, I am proud and humbled that I'll be sitting alongside Grandpa Bill and Tom (Korean War veterans whom I regard as my dear grandfathers) because they're the Day's honorees as well as reason for my existence.

Veterans Day will thus be a day of reflection, representing the present.

To my ire, an 81-year-old South Korean prisoner-of-war (POW) of North Korea for almost 60 years made his escape to China in mid-August but may be reportedly forced back to the North. The poor man has been detained at a hospital in Yanji since August 26 when he was arrested by Chinese police.

According to South Korea's Ministry of Defense, 79 POWs and 182 members of their families have safely repatriated to South Korea since 1994, and as many as 560 POWs could still be held in the North.

This staggering incident not only calls the South Korean government to do everything to retrieve the POWs, but should also incite its citizens, as well as the international community, to demand actions from their leaders to seek the information of their unreturned military personnel.

For example, the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs lists 8,176+ as the number of soldiers unaccounted for (bodies not identified/bodies not recovered) from the Korean War alone; this figure includes 2,045 POWs and 4,245 MIAs (Missing in Action).

For this reason, and in the belief that ``When one American is not worth the effort to be found, we as Americans have lost," veterans Artie Muller and Ray Manzo started Rolling Thunder and its famous ``Ride for Freedom," also known simply as ``The Run," which take place every Memorial Day in DC.

Just before Veterans Day in 1987, the two met at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because they ``both wanted to do something about the POW/MIA issue." Artie and Ray wanted to ``wake up the American public and educate them about the many American POWs that had been left behind," and ``shake the hell out of the United States government" to let it know they were ``not satisfied with their inaction on the POW/MIA issue."

Consequently, on their first run, some 2,600 motorcycle riders and thousands of supporters lined the streets as members of Rolling Thunder roared into Washington ``to honor our brothers and sisters on the Wall as well as veterans of all wars that gave their lives for their country."

Twenty years and many successful legislations later, they approximate that ``an influx of over 100,000 bikers riding in from the four corners of the country" and another 800,000 Americans come "to demonstrate that POW/MIAs do exist," and protect future veterans so that they will be ``guaranteed" not to be left behind.

I've attended the last two runs and wholeheartedly agree with Artie that ``One had to be there to feel the rush in his veins." It shouldn't, however, take thousands of rolling Harleys, thundering into a nation's capital, to remind me or you or our government to search for those who never returned home. We should really ride (or stride) for their freedom, at every opportunity.

Finally, Veterans Day shall be a day of resurgence … of hope … for the future.

Veterans Day really came about because there was simply no further need to observe WWI's Armistice Day ― the Treaty of Versailles (signed June 28, 1919) technically ended that war, and the San Francisco Peace Treaty between the Allied Powers and Japan, (signed Sept. 8, 1951) officially put an end to WWII.

Therefore, while the Korean War's is the longest-standing cease-fire agreement (since July 27, 1953), and though June 25, 2010 kicks off the 60th anniversary of the longest-running war from the Cold War era (that may have cost as many lives as the Great War), the Korean War Armistice Day may very well possibly, one day, be replaced as World Peace Day.

Hannah Kim is a 2009 master's graduate of the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, specializing in legislative affairs. She spearheaded the passage of the ``Korean War Veterans Recognition Act, U.S. Public Law 111-41," which was signed by President Obama on July 27, 56 years to the day after the Korean War Armistice was signed in 1953. She can be reached at hkim@remember727.org.