Their War

"Looking back on it, it should have," says Suls. "This is our country, and people were attacking us, and that shouldn't happen."

A couple of years later, Suls did think about joining the Air Force to help pay for college -- his father, a lawyer, died when Suls was 12. He'd been in the Air National Guard for two years long before Suls was born. "My mother said: 'I'm not going to let you go in the Air Force. It's not happening.'" He laughs. "Typical mother response."

Now he's majoring in government and politics instead, preparing to study law. He wears his father's dog tags.

Back in high school, a military recruiter walked up to Lutsky and asked if he'd ever thought about joining. "No," Lutsky says he replied, "I gotta go to lunch." Lutsky wears his hair on the longish side and his ball cap backwards. He hasn't chosen a major yet, but he's interested in music. He initially describes himself as "against the military," but, as he and Suls talk, he decides that what he's really against is the war in Iraq. "There are things to fight for," he says. "I know you can get a good education in the military, get trained in a lot of different areas -- stealth, special forces."

"SEALs," says Suls, and then they're both laughing at their own preoccupation with the military's glamour boys. Lutsky blames the shortage of troops on Iraq, but both he and Suls frown at the suggestion of a draft.

"Political suicide," Suls declares. "And there are always too many loopholes. The people who would go would be the underprivileged people who are getting recruited right now."

Lutsky puts down his burger. "We saw how it turned out with Vietnam. We don't want a repeat. To get people to join, they should offer better perks."

"The perks are decent. It's what they do with the military," Suls argues, and Lutsky nods. They agree that they don't trust their elected leaders to pick causes worth fighting for. They compare Afghanistan with Iraq, cite nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, their voices fading into the roar of shoppers, mall Muzak and beeping cash registers on a long, idle holiday weekend commemorating America's war dead.

VIETNAM WAS THE TURNING POINT.

In the heat of an unpopular war, decades of social trends boiled over: the development of relativistic theologies, growing legal emphasis on the rights of the individual and the emergence of the teenage years as a time free from both parental restrictions and adult responsibilities. These trends empowered and united war opponents with a moral certainty that surpassed anything seen during previous conflicts, as described by Frank Schaeffer and Kathy Roth-Douquet in AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service -- and How It Hurts Our Country.

In Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland lied about body counts, and American soldiers massacred women and children at My Lai. Vietnam taught its generation to distrust the military. The collective memory of Vietnam's luckless, disadvantaged draftees, forced to fight a politically polarizing war, and the certainty of the protesters that they were right to oppose it, still shape civilian American attitudes toward the military. While pre-Vietnam generations saw military service as an apolitical civic duty, Schaeffer points out that today's civilians tend to see it as a career choice for the underprivileged, a choice that also depends on whether they approve of the policies of the moment.

"The new excuse is, I'd never send my son to fight in Iraq," says Schaeffer. An author with no military background who lives in an affluent area near Boston, Schaeffer also blames the lingering priorities of the Me Generation. "My class are dismissive of anything other than the glittering fast track of money."