Do you remember the 1940's poster of a warship, its bow nearly perpendicular to the ocean's surface while its stern slipped under the waters? The caption "Loose Lips Sink Ships" acknowledges the vital role the home front played in the winning of World War II.

The efforts and sacrifices and deprivations, willingly endured, by people on the home front entitle them to be honored along with the veterans of the armed forces, traditionally saluted every November. For, as Milton observed, "They also serve who only stand and wait."

Thousands of civilians did much more than wait. Several now live at Carolina Meadows. Although the uniformed forces bore the brunt of the war, their singleness of purpose in defeating the Axis forces was matched by those at home. After the Pearl Harbor attack, when men flocked to sign up to serve their country, women, most of whom had never previously worked outside the home, rushed to fill the vacuum in the work places.

Aircraft manufacturer Curtiss-Wright plucked Marge Vaiden from college in Minnesota to study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, to earn an accelerated associate engineering degree, then to work in their offices in Caldwell, N.J., for the duration of the war.

"We were proud to be able to temporarily replace men so they could be released for active service," Vaiden said.

While Jean Waldner's husband, Dudley, served on a minesweeper out of Newport, R.I., Jean and a group of other women were guarded by soldiers while en route to the Naval Torpedo Station on Goat Island. Like Rosie, they wore work clothes as they packed gunpowder into canisters all day.

"Although the work was dangerous, it was routine and tedious," Waldner said, "and our hands were stained yellow from the gunpowder."

During her college years, after completing a three-week course at the Ford plant in Willow Run, Mich., "Mike" Bailey crawled over airplanes to inspect machine guns mounted in the turrets of B-24s that had just rolled off the production lines.

"I couldn't do that now," she said, laughing.

Ruth Penberthy and Nancy Dixon are two of many women at Carolina Meadows who remember rolling bandages, sewing and doing various other tasks for the Red Cross.

In England, Mary Pettis remembers choosing some items from those "Bundles For Britain." Residents served as airplane spotters and air raid wardens during mock air raid drills, making sure no light showed through the blackout curtains at night.

While Americans coped with shortages and rationing, those on the other side of the Atlantic often simply did without. We turned down our thermostats and closed off little-used rooms to conserve energy, but in England they ran out of heating supplies.

We in America knew U-boats were just off the Eastern coast, but in preparation for a possible invasion in the British Isles, barbed wire was strung along the coast and all the road signs were taken down. "Even if you lived there, it was easy to get lost," Pettis said.

With three air fields nearby, the Luftwaffe raided often. The mandatory gas masks frightened the children, but "We had to have them with us at all times," said Barbara Morse.

The V-2 rockets were even worse.

"At least with the air raids, you know the planes were coming and could get to the relative safety of the shelters, where school children often did their homework and took exams," she said. "But the self-propelled rockets, dubbed 'Doodlebugs,' gave no such warning."

In occupied Holland, Barbara Rodbell lived very near where the rockets were launched toward England where Mary and Barbara Morse lived.

The three women now live on the same street in Carolina Meadows.

Barbara had a regular job during the day and worked surreptitiously in the evenings with the Dutch underground. Her whole family had been shipped to the camps. Because she had good papers -- "Everything depended on your papers," she says -- she was able to move around the small country relatively safely, sometimes escorting people in danger to a safer location.

In southern France, Simone Lipman worked with the unarmed French Resistance. Their underground teams made false papers, ration cards, and identity cards. She also worked openly with a child relief agency that rescued children of families confined to camps with deplorable conditions by locating safe homes with non-Jewish French people. "Imagine," she says, "we were 18 and 19 years old and had to convince parents to give up their children, whom they probably would never see again."

American families dreaded getting a telegram from the War Department.

The war to end all wars did not. Today and children and grandchildren of the Greatest Generation make up the home front during another war.

But now there is no sense of singleness of purpose, no unanimity of outlook. But the worry and the pain of separation and loss are the same. Those spouses and parents and siblings and children, now as then, may indeed have the toughest assignment.

So this November, as Carolina Meadows salutes our nation's uniformed veterans, we will also honor those who through history have stood, or still stand, and wait.