Balding Boomers, Eat your Hearts Out

The deification in recent years of the World War Two generation has been an interesting phenomenon. One supposes it began in the late 90's, with the twin vehicles of Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation, and the release of Saving Private Ryan.

I was born in 1973. When I was a kid every one's grandfather had been in 'the war'. My mother's father fought in Europe with an anti-aircraft unit, while my father's father spent most of the war in Louisiana, where he met my grandmother. In the spring of 1945, he joined a medical unit that would have gone ashore with the first wave in the invasion of Japan. My grandmother's brother was an old horse soldier, teaching riding to generals daughters at Ft. Knox. For some reason (feel free to speculate) he ended up in the 5307th, better known as Merrill's Marauders.

You could learn the history of World War Two just by watching movies on the local channel's, we've all seen 'em a hundred times. That war seemed close, and intimate. The fact that you knew people who fought in the war seemed unremarkable.

If some one's father had been in Vietnam, wow that was something. Though there were a few here and there.

Of course, growing up in the 70's and 80's also meant you were subjected to what, for some of us, became known as the Dreaded Nine Words, 'Did I ever tell you kids about the 60's?' In fact, so prevalent was the boomer nostalgia movement that one almost got the sense that you were actually growing up in the 50's. A yearly feature of my high school was 50's and 60's day.

Generation X, raised on guaranteed nuclear annihilation, the AIDS crises, environmental doom, child abductions, poisoned Halloween candy, date rape, and the drug war looked back at the 50's and saw a utopia. You could walk down the street at night, by yourself even.

The music was alright, and tye dye t-shirts sure do look nice across coed busts, but was the country really so bad off that it required everything the Vietnam generation put us through? Anyone thinking the 60's did the nation much good ought to compare and contrast the 1965 New York blackout with the 1977 version, and then again with the 2003 event.

In his book about the 1970's David Frum writes, 'The millions of Americans born since 1970 seem to have collectively decided that the Boomers are absolutely the most boring generation of old fogies ever to have inflicted their reminiscences on the young.' he later concludes, 'Who would not be prouder of having fought through the mud of Guadalcanal than having fornicated in the mid at Woodstock?'

This is exactly right. Young people actually do like hearing about when their parents and grandparents were kids, just not all the time, they have to ask first. The information should never be volunteered. 'Grandma, did girl's where short skirts to dances?' is a far better way to connect than an unsolicited, 'Why, back in my day...'

When describing the young soldiers of Operation Desert Storm, PJ O'Rourke, himself a product of the 60's wrote, 'These are the Reagan kids. This generation took one look at the 60's and said give me a haircut and a job.'

For more about Will, visit http://www.gulfwarone.com/. His novel, 'A Line Through the Desert' can be purchased here.