ChiTownScion
Call Me a Cab
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- The Great Pacific Northwest
It's important to remember that "The Greatest Generation" never, ever called itself that. Tom Brokaw invented the term to sell a book in the 1990s. Before that, those Americans born between 1910 and 1925 were called the "GI Generation" or the "Swing Generation." They would have been the last people to aggrandize themselves as some kind of holy icons, and it's ill serving them, now that most of them are dead, to treat them as such today. Civic worship of the military is in every way incompatible with the principles for which, supposedly, WWII was fought. (Although those who actually saw combat would probably tell you the only principle they had in mind was "don't get killed.")
That is certainly my experience, and I was practically raised by guys who had served in World War II, including but not limited to my dad. Youth group leaders, bosses, mentors, etc. They were all around me, really- and I learned from an early age to distinguish elders who had served in the Second World War with those who had not. (I remember dating one girl whose father loved to play the tough guy/ father of the girlfriend role who was clearly too young to have "been there" as my dad had been: I regarded him as an overaged punk.)
The flag waving jingoism was an embarrassment to them, something engaged in by older Americans of the World War One generation who were involved in that nightmare for a relatively brief time compared to their generation from Britain, the Commonwealth, France, Germany, and other European nations who had to endure the brutality of trench warfare for far longer.
I've had this discussion before with some of my millennial friends, but the "thank you for your service" accolades that are passed out like Halloween candy today would have embarrassed the hell out of guys I knew who had really survived the horrors of World War II combat. To them the real heroes were the guys who never came home.