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Commentary: The sappiest generation

D-Day, one of the pivotal events of World War II, unfolds: U.S. troops wade through the water at Normandy

My cantankerous father and my own better judgment won't let me get sentimental about WWII veterans

In this story: War experience A generation's cheerleader Fighting the next war RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Sean Elder
Salon Magazine

(SALON) -- The weekend before July Fourth found World War II being fought all over again on The New York Times bestsellers list. Tom Brokaw's book "The Greatest Generation" and its sequel, "The Greatest Generation Speaks," held the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively, flanked by James Bradley's "Flags of Our Fathers" at No. 1 and Bob Greene's "Duty" at No. 9. While the preponderance of titles relating to the war and its veterans constitutes an obvious trend (sales doubtless reflected a recent spate of Father's Day gift giving), "The Greatest Generation" is the real phenomenon. The book has been on The New York Times bestsellers list for more than 80 weeks now and shows no signs of flagging.

To Brokaw, all the veterans are united by a certain stoicism and bravery. "They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest," reads a typical quote. "They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history. They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare."

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All of which sounds too good to be true.

"I keep saying, 'They weren't perfect, they made mistakes, there were failures,'" Brokaw told me in April. "There are even accounts of those failures in the books."

But the fact that those shortcomings don't register with readers says a lot about who is buying the book: veterans of the war -- now in their 70s and 80s, many of whom have formed Greatest Generation clubs and held Greatest Generation reunions -- and their children, some of whom are finally ready to listen to their parents' war stories.

Growing up, my brothers and sisters and I heard plenty about my father's war experiences in the Marines. He enlisted just after his 17th birthday, in May 1942, and served as a gunner in a torpedo bomber in the Solomon Islands. As kids we marveled at his stories of close calls in combat and out (he told us a sniper's bullet grazed his hair when he stuck his head out of his pup tent once), and wondered at the photos of him from that time. There was one in particular that caught our fancy: young Dad, dressed in khaki pants and a T-shirt, cradling a machine gun and smiling like he'd just won the lottery. Upon receiving the picture in the mail his mother was said to have cried, "They've made a killer of my baby!"

Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" has become a phenomenon. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 80 weeks

"We were all hot for action in those days," my father says when I ask him why he chose the Marines. "I wanted adventure -- they were having a big war out there and I was missing it.

"I was a romanticist but a lot of other people certainly weren't," my father continues. "At 17, I forgive myself, but I'd never do it again."

Never do it again? For many of the veterans in "The Greatest Generation," the experience of the war is sacrosanct. Joe Foss, a recipient of the Medal of Honor, told Brokaw, "Folks now just don't have an appreciation for what an oath means. When we took the oath when we were sworn into the Marines, it was a contract."

My father takes a somewhat contrary position. Of the First World War (which his father tried to join by lying about his age) he says, "We went off to war and we didn't get anything. They could have given us Canada, at least. I think the motto after World War I should have been, 'How about Canada this time?'"

My mother served in the Marines as well, teaching in a gunnery school. Hers was a hard-knock life -- her mother died when she was a teenager and she cared for her father and siblings until leaving home -- and when the war broke out, it offered the opportunity of escape, mixed in with a higher calling. "Something was going on and you weren't part of it," she says. "There was no fear or gallantry; I just wanted to be part of it."

Tom Brokaw was born in 1940, a "niche," as he calls himself. A proud native of South Dakota, if Brokaw had an archetype it would be the Good Son -- the bridge between the two generations he stands between, the boomers and their parents.

Brokaw's interest in the war generation manifested itself in 1984 when he was doing a documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day for NBC News. Ten years later, during a ceremony honoring the event's 50th anniversary, he said, "I think this is the greatest generation any society has produced."

A Marine stands on the wing of his plane: "When we took the oath when we were sworn into the Marines, it was a contract," Medal of Honor winner Joe Foss told Brokaw

He's certainly found a lot of people to go along with him. (It's worth noting that some of Brokaw's colleagues who are among the "Greatest Generation," such as professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney, protest the appellation.) Aside from the first book and its sequel, his conceit has yielded an NBC documentary (available on videotape) and he is now considering a third book on the subject. In this one, he says, he may accentuate the negative a bit more, tell a few more tales fraught with postwar failure and disappointment.

"Because I think there's a lesson in that, as well," he says. "With their own failures came successes and understanding -- even insights."

When I ask him if he thinks men were more selfless then, my father offers a jaded response.

"I don't buy it," he says with a laugh. "I was just reading about the Mexican War here and how they were saying, 'What we need are more selfless men!' That's fine for the guy who's not going."

He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and then UC-Berkeley while my mother began to have children, five in all. He majored in English and ended up teaching but not, as I learned, because he thought it was some great calling.

"I thought I'd be a writer but I could never get going on it," he says now, with a candor that surprises me. "I thought, well, I can teach, anyway."

That sense of desperation plagued a lot of men after the war -- more than Brokaw's books suggest, certainly. At the time it was only occasionally acknowledged, as it was in the classic film "The Best Years of Our Lives." "The veterans hospitals were very full of returnees," my mother recalls. "Suicides, people who had lost everything. Their jobs were gone."

For some men, military experience fed directly into their work lives. By the same token, the regimentation of military life -- not to mention the mindless, by-the-book bureaucracy of its day-to-day operation -- prepared many vets for corporate life. "They were the We generation, not the Me generation," says Brokaw. "They really did believe in collective effort and the big corporation."

My father was of two minds during the Vietnam War. "I felt that we should go and fight and at the same time I felt we got in the wrong goddamn war at the wrong place," he says. "They weren't fighting it properly. I still think the old military axiom is, Go for the throat, for the king."

Movies like "Saving Private Ryan" have helped romanticize the war almost in spite of themselves

But beneath the reactionary front, he was starting to have his doubts. "I remember driving across the Bay Bridge and being behind a military truck full of stuff, headed for Travis Air Force Base (California), and I looked at all these things piled up in the back and realized they were caskets," he recalls. "Jesus, that gave me a terrible turn."

My mother believes my generation would rise to the occasion if our nation was truly threatened. "If something momentous happened," she says, "if we went to a war with a major equal of some kind, I think people would scurry around like crazy." My father goes her one further:

"I think this generation, if there was what they thought was a just war, would do just as well as we did," he says. "Probably better. You guys don't smoke as much."

Gym-fit boomers, spoiling for a fight! The Gulf War saw millions of same watching CNN and cheering video of "smart bombs" taking out enemy installations. Game over! It seemed too easy -- and, as Saddam Hussein continues to remind us, it was.

In the documentary made from "The Greatest Generation," Frank Kilmer, the son of a former prisoner in a Nazi POW camp, admits to Brokaw that he envies his father his war experience -- not the danger of the bombing runs or the fight for survival in the camp but the sheer certitude of his actions. For his father, he said, going to war "was a clear road to virtuous activity. I think in our day and age, it's a lot harder to find."

But as writers from Homer to Remarque have reminded us, it is a "virtuous activity" that involves the death of many young men. By 1945 the Germans were sending pie-faced boys just a few years past childhood to serve as cannon fodder. The justness of the cause certainly served to ameliorate many of the horrific memories veterans of that war brought home with them. But it does not wash away the blood.

And as much as Brokaw wants to honor the experience and memories of those whose lives he chronicled, the Greatest Generation phenomenon is only reducing it to a clichˇ. Like Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" -- which began so well, conveying a sense of claustrophobia and fear as sharp as the taste of metal on the tongue -- it fades to sepia as an old duffer asks his wife if he's been a good man.

There isn't much that's sepia-toned about my dad. I know he sometimes wonders about his own life and its purpose, if not whether he has been a good man. But he is not going all that quietly into his dotage, and the last thing I expect him to accept is the accolade of greatness as they close the coffin lid.

Columnist explores the generation that won the war
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'The Greatest Generation'
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