Saratoga News
Columns
Point of View
War a defining event for generation after generation
By Carl Heintze
Every generation, it seems to me, experiences a defining event it bears with it for the rest of its life.
My father's generation had World War I and the Depression. I had World War II. My children have borne all their lives Vietnam in one way or another, and their children will, in ways we cannot yet see, have to deal with Iraq.
Of course, much more happened individually in each generation's life than these single events. Every person has his own personal set of burdens to carry as he or she lives: a good or a bad childhood, a wonderful or disastrous marriage, the death of parents, success and failure in work, physical disability or financial and personal success. I'm not talking about these.
I'm trying to come to grips with the change in our lives of a wider kind.
What I'm talking about are the larger events over which no one individual has control and which somehow move the person in one direction or another, just as they move a generation toward its place in American history.
I suppose it's wrong to conclude that individually we can't make a difference, but few of us are so privileged. Instead we are formed not just by what happens in our individual lives, but also about what takes place in the larger world in which we live.
These events vary in intensity.
World War I, for instance, was less traumatic than World War II. Our involvement in it was much less universal than World War II. World War I affected mostly men and it affected those who got sent overseas more than those who didn't. At the same time World War I swept away Victorian culture and gave way to the Roaring '20s and the rise and fall of the stock market.
It was the precursor to the Depression.
The Depression became a burden to all those who were in it. My mother-in-law, for instance, one day found herself a single mother with 8 cents in her pocket. She also had a bankbook from a bankrupt savings and loan where her life savings had once rested.
For years she kept the account passbook in the hopes the savings and loan would return to solvency. It never did.
She never forgot what that was like as long as she lived. Even after things got better and she no longer had to worry about finances, she still stored reserves against the return of that terrible day she was sure would come again.
Although it never did, if it did, she would be prepared.
World War II was destined to be the great event in my life and in the life of my generation. For most of us it seemed a triumph, an assurance that we had fought the good fight and that our loyalty and valor had been rewarded.
But for others it meant the loss, the loss of years, of innocence, of someone close. At the same time The War, as we thought of it, the only real war, gave us the assurance that we could in time run the world.
It turned out we couldn't.
Vietnam was the first inkling that we were not omnipotent. We struggled with it for years, never quite willing to admit defeat, still sure we were fighting the good fight against a mortal enemy.
Though we may have thought we were still on the crusade we undertook in World War II, we weren't. The Cold War did not end in Vietnam.
Each time I go to the Veterans Administration clinic, I see the effects of Vietnam on those who fought there. Once hyped by drugs, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, still bitter because they think they have been rejected by the country they tried to serve, they are unresolved debris of that conflict.
Either they jitter through the clinic, constantly and nervously verbal, or sit silently in corners, talking to no one, still casualties.
They are living evidence that larger events mark the individual, a generation, a world.
Unfortunately, we seem not to have applied these generational lessons in Iraq. In the face of a population unwilling to be "saved" by our intervention, we persisted, unwilling to admit we might have been wrong in the first place.
What that persistence will do to my grandchildren's generation remains to be seen.
One thing seems certain, though: History seldom turns out as we expect it to. And what Iraq does to us will be with us for as long as my grandchildren's generation lives.
So, is there a larger lesson in all this besides history's uncertain course?
I'm not sure.
But I believe history to be a true teacher. What is less certain to me is how we learn its lessons. But even if we fail its instruction history persists, insists, is a force and with its passing leaves the marks we will bear with us for as long as we live.
