were busy rebelling against the conformity that had stifled creativity after the war. We wanted to celebrate our individuality. We wanted to be unique, creative, one of a kind. Average was boring; boring was death.
But average is a statistical fiction; there is no such thing. The irony is that there was nothing average about our father. He was unique in so many ways—ways that directly influenced who his sons grew up to be. For reasons that remain unclear to me, he chose not to take advantage of the GI Bill, the 1944 law that guaranteed college tuition for veterans. Being a few years older than the average returning soldier, he may have felt that he’d seen and survived too much to resume student life (which never particularly appealed to him). Nevertheless, he continued to learn. A pilot, a woodsman, a lifelong reader, an avid follower of popular science and science fiction, he was an interesting person, and yet a person determined to hide his light under the cloak of normalcy, almost as though he was afraid his friends might discover he wasn’t the good conformist they thought he was. This self-deprecating attitude, this denial even to himself of his uniqueness, drove Terence and me up the wall. We had many fierce arguments about it, arguments that only hardened positions on both sides, reinforcing our determination never to be average guys, and never, ever, to be like our father.
I now have more perspective on how history, largely in the form of war, left its mark on all of us. My parents came of age in an era dominated by World War II, and the looming specter of global conflict, followed by its horrific reality, had a lasting impact on how their lives unfolded. But after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s invasions of Poland and France, it was clearly a just war, a “good” war their generation had to fight. If you were able-bodied, you enlisted; it was the right thing to do. You rearranged your plans and made the sacrifices that most everyone else was making in order to save what amounted to human civilization. The young had little choice but to put their private dreams on hold until this horrific bit of geopolitical business had been dealt with. That imperative limited the options that were available to my parents and their contemporaries, even as it shaped their enduring attitudes and worldviews.
I sometimes wonder if, in our father’s situation, I would have had the courage to enlist. I suppose I would have; peer pressure alone would have made it tough to do otherwise. There was an anti-war movement during World War II, but it was small, and our parents surely had nothing to do with it. The prevailing view was that the war had to be fought, a view I share.
My generation was also deeply affected by war, but in very different ways. Our war, in Vietnam, was shot through with moral ambiguity, a war this country had no clear need or justification to fight. It seemed to be a grim game played with the lives of young Americans (not to mention untold numbers of Vietnamese) who were asked (and ordered, via the draft) to serve a cause whose rationale was murky indeed, lost in the obfuscations and double-talk of war-mongering generals, breast-beating super-patriots and mealy-mouthed politicians. With time, a moral imperative to the war did emerge, and the imperative was: Don’t go. Resist. Tell the government and the politicians to take their war and shove it. And that’s what a lot of us did.
Certainly that’s what Terence and I did. Like many of our peers, we’d had our minds blown with LSD and had bought into the hippy-dippy, peace-and-love, counterculture paradigm. Naturally, this trend shocked and appalled many in our parents’ generation, as did the disrespect for authority that resistance to the war necessitated. In my opinion, the Vietnam War and the widespread use of LSD were the two events that contributed most to the ideological and cultural divisions that ripped apart the country in the sixties. Those wounds
But average is a statistical fiction; there is no such thing. The irony is that there was nothing average about our father. He was unique in so many ways—ways that directly influenced who his sons grew up to be. For reasons that remain unclear to me, he chose not to take advantage of the GI Bill, the 1944 law that guaranteed college tuition for veterans. Being a few years older than the average returning soldier, he may have felt that he’d seen and survived too much to resume student life (which never particularly appealed to him). Nevertheless, he continued to learn. A pilot, a woodsman, a lifelong reader, an avid follower of popular science and science fiction, he was an interesting person, and yet a person determined to hide his light under the cloak of normalcy, almost as though he was afraid his friends might discover he wasn’t the good conformist they thought he was. This self-deprecating attitude, this denial even to himself of his uniqueness, drove Terence and me up the wall. We had many fierce arguments about it, arguments that only hardened positions on both sides, reinforcing our determination never to be average guys, and never, ever, to be like our father.
I now have more perspective on how history, largely in the form of war, left its mark on all of us. My parents came of age in an era dominated by World War II, and the looming specter of global conflict, followed by its horrific reality, had a lasting impact on how their lives unfolded. But after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s invasions of Poland and France, it was clearly a just war, a “good” war their generation had to fight. If you were able-bodied, you enlisted; it was the right thing to do. You rearranged your plans and made the sacrifices that most everyone else was making in order to save what amounted to human civilization. The young had little choice but to put their private dreams on hold until this horrific bit of geopolitical business had been dealt with. That imperative limited the options that were available to my parents and their contemporaries, even as it shaped their enduring attitudes and worldviews.
I sometimes wonder if, in our father’s situation, I would have had the courage to enlist. I suppose I would have; peer pressure alone would have made it tough to do otherwise. There was an anti-war movement during World War II, but it was small, and our parents surely had nothing to do with it. The prevailing view was that the war had to be fought, a view I share.
My generation was also deeply affected by war, but in very different ways. Our war, in Vietnam, was shot through with moral ambiguity, a war this country had no clear need or justification to fight. It seemed to be a grim game played with the lives of young Americans (not to mention untold numbers of Vietnamese) who were asked (and ordered, via the draft) to serve a cause whose rationale was murky indeed, lost in the obfuscations and double-talk of war-mongering generals, breast-beating super-patriots and mealy-mouthed politicians. With time, a moral imperative to the war did emerge, and the imperative was: Don’t go. Resist. Tell the government and the politicians to take their war and shove it. And that’s what a lot of us did.
Certainly that’s what Terence and I did. Like many of our peers, we’d had our minds blown with LSD and had bought into the hippy-dippy, peace-and-love, counterculture paradigm. Naturally, this trend shocked and appalled many in our parents’ generation, as did the disrespect for authority that resistance to the war necessitated. In my opinion, the Vietnam War and the widespread use of LSD were the two events that contributed most to the ideological and cultural divisions that ripped apart the country in the sixties. Those wounds
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