Every Generation Who Volunteers To Serve Should Be Called ‘The Greatest Generation’

I was walking down a street in New York City a while ago and saw a man at least twenty years younger than me wearing a prosthetic limb. He was, in fact, ambling along quite well and as such I was impressed with his clear ability to overcome a difficult situation I cannot even fathom.

He also wore a camouflaged fatigue cap and military tan t-shirt with the words “Operation Iraqi Freedom” emblazoned on the chest. And I thought to myself: here is a man who has given so much. Certainly as much as many a veteran of World War II had. Indeed a piece of himself, for a cause that had no victory. No surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay. No ticker tape parade.

Just coming home having served his country (better than it served him) and having left a literal piece of himself in the sands of a distant land at the behest of his commander-in-chief. And who knows how many comrades he saw give the ultimate sacrifice during his tour of duty.

Sometimes I wonder: Should we, perhaps, consider retiring the moniker “Greatest Generation” as a descriptor of those—and only those—who fought Germany and Japan between 1941 and 1945? Is that really fair to all those buried in Arlington Cemetery who happened to have fought for this country since the Civil War? Were they not just as “great”? Cannot this wounded warrior lay claim to “greatness” as much as those who just happened to be born into a different time to fight a different enemy?

This is not a call to diminish the sacrifice of the men and women who fought in all of those terrible battles of World War II. As anyone who has read my articles over the years knows, I hold the men and women who fought against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in awe and with the sincerest gratitude.

But theirs is a small section of the story of the American fighting man and woman. To attach to them the superlative “greatest” is to in a way demean those who went before and after them. How are the men of the Union Army who again and again marched towards the impregnable rebel lines at Fredericksburg having just witnessed the rank before them scythed down like wheat, and yet they moved forward anyway, any less deserving of a seal of greatness as those who stormed Omaha Beach? 

How are the men of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, surrounded by Germans in sub-freezing weather, greater than the 1st Marines’ who pulled off a masterful “advance in the other direction” to the sea while surrounded and under constant attack by the Chinese in the sub-zero wastes of North Korea? Was a P-47 or Corsair pilot winging in at treetop level to strafe and bomb Nazi and Japanese positions any “greater” than the pilots of Huey helicopters flying their much more vulnerable ships into hostile Vietnam LZs to bring in supplies and evacuate wounded under intense enemy fire?

I think of today’s American fighting man and woman, and something occurs to me. First, ours is an all-volunteer service. Fully two-thirds of the “Greatest Generation” were draftees. And no group of young men and women who have ever volunteered for military service today have done so with eyes more wide open than this one.

What I mean is that in the 1940s there was no internet through which to see the shocking imagery of war at one’s fingertips. Nor were there graphic movies as “Saving Private Ryan” to show a prospective volunteer what war really looks like…blood, gore, agonizing and ghastly wounds, terror, men calling for their mothers with their dying breaths, brutality, and both chronic physical and mental exhaustion. Anyone wearing the uniform today does so despite all they have seen.

By contrast, the average World War II volunteer had almost no idea what he was getting himself into. Most had never seen any proper representation of war, save perhaps the old black-and-white Matthew Brady daguerreotypes of the grisly aftermath of Civil War battles like Antietam. War Department censors were diligently at work trying to hide the true cost of the war from the people back home, including those getting ready to join the fight. 

It was not until September, 1943, that Life magazine published the first explicit photo of American dead on the battlefield…three bodies lying on Buna Beach in New Guinea. But these photos, which showed no faces or blood, were mild compared to what was to come. 

The first true revelation of the horrors of a modern battlefield was not laid bare before the American people until March, 1944, a full 28 months into the war. This was the documentary “With The Marines At Tarawa”, which was released to public theaters after being approved by FDR himself. 

The film followed the 2nd Marines storming a tiny Central