WWII veterans are dying out. Almost all of them will be gone within the next decade. Ken Burns and Steven Spielberg have both been working overtime to document grandpa’s war stories while he’s still around to tell them.

WWII veterans are dying out. Almost all of them will be gone within the next decade. Ken Burns and Steven Spielberg have both been working overtime to document grandpa’s war stories while he’s still around to tell them. So why doesn’t the passing of the “The Greatest Generation” make me upset?

Don’t get me wrong, I know that it’s sad. And I certainly appreciate their bravery and sacrifice. But that pales in comparison to my glee that I will no longer be expected to respect my elders. But for the last 60 years, we’ve been so utterly enthralled to the greatness of that generation that it’s a little overwrought.

I don’t hate old people. I don’t even hate Boomers. In fact, I’d say the generation gap is one of the narrower gaps that exist in modern society: I have a lot more in common with some old fart who reads Shelby Foote than I do with the 25-year-old who DVRs every episode of Entourage. And that’s my point: It genuinely doesn’t matter when you were born.

No subsequent generation has won a war against a country that wasn’t near the bottom of the world poverty index, so they can’t very well wave that in my face, so the World War II generation is regarded as the last heroic group of Americans. The kids they raised, on the other hand, were brought up in all the decadent postwar wealth America had accumulated and formed the baby boom. Our perspective on each generation subsequent to that one has been that we are in decline, and that no American generation will ever be as brave or as pure of heart.

I only know one WWII veteran personally. He’s my mother’s uncle, and he served at the front the whole of the war. He drove a Panzer through Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. As you might have guessed, he fought on the wrong side — though he was not a Nazi, for what it’s worth, as soldiers in the Wehrmacht were not even allowed to join the party for most of the war.

Germany didn’t have a greatest generation. The preferred anti-depressant of subsequent generations was amnesia, and the generation that fought was mostly ignored as a matter of convenience. Lonnie died in his 80s after a long career as a judge in Munich. He never talked about the war. It wasn’t out of a sense of nobility but rather because everyone of subsequent generations would have preferred that him and the rest of the living reminders of their biggest historical fuck-up would simply disappear.

Lonnie was barely an adult when he was conscripted and likely had no more sophisticated an understanding of the war he was joining than the average U.S. grunt did. Likewise, some kid from Iowa who joined the Marines wasn’t thinking about the fate of the poor Jews in Dachau when he showed up to the recruitment depot. And a year later, when he was pissing into the mouth of some decapitated Jap’s head (as Eugene Sledge reported seeing in his memoirs of the Pacific Theater), he probably wasn’t concerned with the realpolitick of American interests in the Pacific.

VJ Day was celebrated by a soldier bending a nurse over and kissing her so hard she started the Baby Boom. But nobody thought to bring cameras when the the Soviets decided to celebrate the imminent VE Day by turning Berlin into what Gary Brecher called “a giant woodstock of free, forced love.” The Baby Boom in Germany was marked by a startling number of Russian-looking kids.

In our national consciousness, World War II was our glory moment as a nation. When we watch Saving Private Ryan, we marvel at the brave men facing certain death in the first waves of Normandy, and we wring our hands as that pussy Upham cowers in the stairwell while his Jewish friend gets slowly stabbed to death. In reality, most of the dying in World War II was done by civilians on both sides, and most of the fighting was done by the not terribly nice Soviets. Villages in the Eastern Front would change hands between the Nazis and the Communists half a dozen times, and if a peasant sucked up too hard to the Nazis, you could bet he was going to face retribution when Der Kommisar came back to town.

I’m not mentioning these things to draw a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis. Nazis are bad, I think everyone who’s seen Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS learned that lesson. And I don’t think anyone’s too terribly surprised that bad things happened on both sides of a war. But if two people, my Uncle Lonnie and your average American vet, can be either vilified or celebrated for making pretty much the same decision, we might want to re-evaluate our reasoning before we write a hagiography for everyone whose parents happened to fuck during flapper times.

What I hate is the whole notion of “generations.” The impulse to genuflect before the Greatest Generation has less to do with their accomplishments than our insecurity. We don’t admire them, we just hate ourselves. The flip side of this coin is the “kids today” moralizing that’s been going on since Socrates bitched that “the young people of today think of nothing but themselves” (likely after some young nubile refused to let him put his hand up his toga). It doesn’t matter if it’s hatred of youth or veneration of the old, it all derives from the same cowardly impulse to drown the complexities of the here and now in a tidal wave of “whatever happened to Gary Coop-ah” nostalgia.

-QUINN CONWAY
Twitter.com/QuinnConway

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