Generations and their wars

The parents of Baby Boomers had VJ Day.

Baby Boomers had the fall of Saigon.

The children of Baby Boomers have the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Every generation has its war, and every generation has a penultimate moment in that war.

It was interesting to me this week in all the footage I saw of the celebrations of the death of bin Laden -- the man behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- were Millennials, the children of Baby Boomers.

I didn’t see any older people, just younger people celebrating in a way that was reminiscent of the VJ Day celebrations.

The war that of the generation of my children is the Global War on Terror.

It is fought in Afghanistan, though it’s not confined there. It was fought in Iraq, though history will debate whether terror or some other political issue motivated that fight. It is fought wherever the terror network is found.

And over the weekend it was taken into Pakistan where the Navy SEALS found and killed bin Laden on orders from President Barack Obama after a search that started 10 years ago.

World War II was the fight of the parents of Baby Boomers. It was the Greatest Generation that returned and rose up from that war to create the massive middle class that most Baby Boomers were born into and grew up in.

For Baby Boomers the Vietnam War was defining it how differently it was received.

We went there to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam and the perceived domino effect of Chinese Communism taking over the entirety of Southeast Asia.

It was unpopular. It divided the country politically. Some Boomers chose to take up the fight in Vietnam, others were drafted into the fight, others found ways to avoid the fight. Some Boomers took up the fight against the war in the streets of college campuses.

On April 30, 1975 when Saigon, the capitol of South Vietnam, fell to the North Vietnamese it was met by the nation with a sigh of relief, not celebration.

The Baby Boomer war ended with a whimper.

The War on Terror isn’t over, it just reached an important mile marker with the killing of the man who brought terror to the United States.

I doubt that this particular war will have a defining moment when it ends, if it ends at all.

We can pull out of Iraq. We can pull out of Afghanistan, now this country’s longest active combat engagement.

But there won’t be a VJ Day. There won’t be a fall of Saigon. And that’s why the death of bin Laden is important.

The celebration that has accompanied the killing needs to be tempered by reflection of the time and treasure, in human and financial terms, that this war has extracted.

Every war, no matter the generation, comes with a high price.