To Come of Age in Interesting Times

Often in the past four years, I've thought of that old saying that goes something like this: "May you never have the misfortune of living in interesting times." Something like that--anyway, the point being that "interesting times" are usually ones of upheaval.

I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom (1964), but I'm more properly a member of Generation X--though by the time the latter came into its identity, I was already married and living in a world more concerned with Eddie Bauer than Eddie Vedder. I remember a friend once saying, "It seems as though history stopped happening about the time I came along"--a sentiment to which I very much related. Looking back on it, the close of the 1960s--i.e., about the time I started school and first became aware of world events--brought with it a number of phenomena that seemed to indicate an end to history (the latter was even the title of a book published in the late 1980s), most notably the retreat of the United States from the world stage in the aftermath of Vietnam.

At seventeen years of age, I joined the Army--not because I had always had that ambition, but because I had no direction in life and no possible way of paying for college otherwise. It remains one of the best decisions I've ever made, and even now I think often with gratitude of the many great lessons I learned during those two years. This was the early 1980s, remember, and at that time joining the military seemed to be about little more than what Uncle Sam could do for you, not what you could do for Uncle Sam.

One night in the fall of 1983, I was out at a movie (don't remember the flick, but I remember the girl I was with ;-) in downtown Fayetteville, NC, when suddenly the projector stopped and someone in uniform stepped out front with orders for all members of certain units to return to their posts at Fort Bragg immediately. By that point, their comrades in the 82nd Airborne had already launched the invasion of Grenada, the first significant U.S. military action in a decade.

I had just turned nineteen, and I wanted to go to Grenada myself. Not being airborne or infantry, I would never have been part of the fighting, but in a combat situation, even support personnel are in danger. Still, I didn't care: I was young, I had no wife or girlfriend or children. I would have welcomed the adventure--the chance to feel not only that history was happening, but that I was part of it.

Since that time, of course, we've all become very accustomed to history happening, though as we've all found out, the actual outworking of historical events is often highly uncomfortable. History resumed on November 9, 1989--9/11 in the European system of rendering dates--and the end of the Cold War ultimately set the stage, as we have seen, for what some people call World War IV (the Cold War itself having been World War III). Though we call the events taking place right now on the other side of the world "The Iraq War," in fact Iraq is simply a major theatre of operations in a larger, ongoing worldwide conflict whose outcome is far from certain--interesting times indeed.

Would I want to actively participate in that war now, at forty-one, with a wife and children and a business and a million other little threads tying me down to this life and the here and now? Absolutely not. And yet I can say with complete sincerity that if I had been born a couple of decades later, and found myself coming of age now, with the same level of commitments I had in 1983, I would be volunteering to go to Iraq. In any case, the young people in our armed forces during these interesting times deserve respect, admiration, and gratitude--particularly from those of us who served in a sleepier age, when history had not yet resumed. Because of what they're doing, let's hope that the next generation--my own children and their cohorts--will again get to live in uninteresting times.