I'll Be Seeing You

My love affair with the era we call the Greatest Generation began in high school. I picked up "The Longest Day," the classic telling of D-Day by Cornelius Ryan, and read about the courage and determination of American warriors who began the war with one leg kicked out from under them at Pearl Harbor.

I was hooked, and I began reading book after book about World War II. I bought Big Band music, listening to Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade." When I listened to the music from that era, I could feel the will of America pounding with the beat of "In The Mood," and I could sense the longing for loved ones in the words of "I'll Be Seeing You."

Americans were relieved to be done with the Great Depression. Prosperity energized a country that was emerging from a national financial disaster, and men and women were eager and proud to do whatever was necessary to defend their country after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. That fervor, that pride in country, was new to a boy who grew up in the divisive years of the Vietnam War.

While I read book after book about World War II, my awe increased. The country was united, determined to destroy Germany, Japan and Italy. Civilians rationed and did without so that resources could be diverted to the military. I have some of the ration books my grandparents used during the war to buy butter, shoes, sugar, gasoline and other commodities. None of that spirit seemed to exist during Vietnam. If it did, I missed it.

Instead, I saw the My Lai Massacre, as historians call it, screaming from the magazines and newspapers. The campus riots, especially Kent State, were foreign demonstrations to a boy growing up in the conservative Texas Panhandle. The evening news rarely failed to report on Johnson's withering administration, and the chants from the protestors outside the White House gates still echo in my mind.

That was the war I grew up with, and the Watergate scandal, arriving on the heels of our pullout from Vietnam made me more weary of an era plagued with assassinations, riots and an unpopular conflict. I escaped into my books about World War II, where the vision of a country flush with prosperity and love of country soothed me. I admit that I romanticized the military, and I did join the Air Force a few years later. It wasn't the escapade-loving military I had read about in the books on World War II. Instead, it was an organization that was largely populated by cynical and usually bitter veterans of Vietnam. Some of them made my life hell. But overall, I liked the Air Force.

I know the United States wasn't perfect during the years of World War II. We were segregated, and no black Americans received a Medal of Honor during the war, although I'm certain, some of them displayed the heroism deserving of one. We weren't a perfect nation, but we were a patriotic one.

It's that feeling I long for and wish we could capture again on this anniversay of Pearl Harbor.