The Quietest War (October 2006 | Volume: 57, Issue: 5)

The Quietest War

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Authors: Kevin Baker

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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October 2006 | Volume 57, Issue 5

The war in Iraq has been going on for three and a half years now. That’s about the same amount of time America spent fighting World War II. This seems almost impossible, considering how firmly the Second World War is embedded in our collective memory. We have even come to think of an entire generation—"The Greatest Generation"—in terms of that struggle. Cliché or not, we can still see the sharp cut of their uniforms, and those sharp 1940s civvies, the way they wore their hair back then, the America they lived in. We can still hear the music they listened to and the ebullient, confident way they spoke. Images of men shipping out to distant lands, storming the beaches of Normandy and Tarawa; fighting carrier battles over unimaginably vast areas of the Pacific; and riding in on the wind to bomb Berlin are all etched on our consciousness, whether gleaned from newsreels of the actual events or the countless movies, books, and television shows that keep rolling out every year. Their war seems to have lasted forever.

That is as it should be. World War II was an unparalleled historical event, one that still determines how we live today. There will never be another war like it, fought on such a vast and murderous scale, by so many men and women. What’s more, we fought it for a good cause; indeed, for the best of causes. Not even turning the war into a cliché can diminish what it was and what we achieved, for the very best things devolve into cliché sooner or later, right down to those Lincoln and Washington impersonators prattling on TV about four-wheel drive during the annual President’s Day sales.

Even the fissures that Vietnam opened in our society can be seen as an enduring lesson in liberty.

The war in Iraq, by contrast, is conspicuous by its silence, its seeming brevity. “Oh, has the war been going on that long? It seems like it started just yesterday.” Of course, our current war is not nearly as immense, or as deadly or as crucial, thank God, as the one that the Greatest Generation fought. But that still doesn’t account for how little it seems to engage us, how much trouble it has even getting any significant time on the local news most evenings. Certainly, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and even John Hay’s “splendid little” Spanish-American War were about as concentrated and lasted for a much shorter time. Our official involvement in World War I, the original Great War, lasted less than half the time the war in Iraq has gone on, from April 1917 to November 1918, and U.S. troops fought in strength during only one campaign season. Nonetheless, all these shorter conflicts swept up the nation in patriotic fervor. In American history, only the Revolution, the Civil War, and Vietnam have been longer sustained conflicts.

One might attribute this strange silence to our decidedly mixed