A Bifurcated Life

Driving north after an away lacrosse game, my Audi full of high school seniors, Big Cuter and I were having one of our serious discussions.   I don't remember the topic, but I do remember his conclusion:

My generation has never experienced an American loss.  You had assassinations and Vietnam.  We see only wins.

Six months later, a freshman at Georgetown, he watched the smoke rise from the Pentagon on September 11.  The losses would start to pile up.  His life now had a before and after.  He was 18.

The war in Afghanistan has persisted throughout his entire adulthood.  There was no draft.  Some in their generation raced to the battle - Pat Tillman wasn't drafted - but most just shared the generalized angst of a war being fought on our own shores.

That faded soon enough. The war, as Wolf Blitzer mentioned today, was rarely the first or second story on the evening news.  It was hardly ever a  headline. His friend served in Iraq; we thought of him every day.  Once my friend returned from Afghanistan, it hardly ever entered my thoughts.  Malala and Karzai and Taliban were words that floated through the news, but my attention was usually drawn elsewhere.

Vietnam was my high school and college, but by graduate school the terror had ended.  My son and his friends never had to induce allergy attacks to avoid service; those who joined the fight had nobler motives, I think, than those who ran from it in the 1960's and '70's.  

But then, as now, we were trying to solve a Civil War.... and that doesn't end well for the intervener, as Joe Biden continues to point out.

The effects on a generation who've only known an America engaged in a futile war, who grew up believing in American exceptionalism and had the facts (ie, their life experiences) to prove it - well that remains to be seen.