Even so, in this season of commemorations of D-Day, there is one such boomer-blessed assumption that, speaking for my generational kind, I wish to challenge. It is that we who came before were lucky because World War II was the last good war, a morally and politically unambiguous war, a veritable no-brainer so far as the decision to engage, nationally and personally, was concerned. The corollary is that, by contrast, pretty much everything that has faced those who came after – from Vietnam on – has been the opposite. (Korea, an unpopular war that racked the nation politically, is generally left out of this formulation, although it was, in its way, the beginning of the transition from one kind of thinking about these things to another.)

Let me be clear: I do recognize the enormous differences in terms of national threat and clarity of both moral and military purpose between the war we fought in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific, and the war we fought in Indochina. I also favor many of the key changes in attitude and expectation that mark our outlook on military enterprises now: an insistence on more openness and public participation in government’s decisions to get involved, a more questioning attitude toward official pronouncements, a more sophisticated understanding of both when we are being manipulated and how imperfect the hard-edged delineation of international good guys versus bad guys usually is.

But all this, while true, can be taken mindlessly to the wrong place, to a kind of absolute, no-nuances certitude that does violence to some important facts. One is that our pre-Pearl Harbor taking of sides in World War II was not an easy or politically unanimous decision. Another is that for those who ended up fighting it, the war was not a glorious, unambiguously welcomed ours-is-not-to-question-why experience. A third is that it is our change in thinking that accounts for much of what is now seen as a 100 percent difference between an easy-choice good war and a subsequent string of anguish-making, morally wanting bad ones. To the extent that we misunderstand all this, we (1) distort and minimize the achievement of those who won the war and (2) give ourselves, half a century later, too easy an out from the national choices we have to make in this respect, since measured against that unimpeachable 1940s conflict, no conflict could be worthy of our engagement.

As a child in World War II, I was of course totally carried away by the swell of the sentimental wartime music, by a belief in the unalloyed monstrosity of every Axis soldier we were fighting, by my own ferocious, single-minded patriotism. We kids were all like that and happily didn’t notice that our own individual war efforts were pretty unlikely to scare the enemy. Mine included writing impassioned poems about the valor of our soldiers fighting in places like Caen and St-Lo, growing puny radishes in my victory garden and flirting in a shameless 11-year-old’s way with the servicemen who came to our house for dinner under a local hospitality program. But even I, in my unconditional ardor, could have told you that it wasn’t quite as simple as people think today.

For instance, I could have told you there had been much argument in the adult world around me of teachers and radio pundits and friends’ parents concerning the wisdom and/or necessity of our getting involved at all, that there was much blame of our president for getting us into it. I could have told you, too, that there was a lot of feeling, at least at the beginning, that the British were a pretty treacherous, snooty bunch and were probably not worth the expenditure of American lives. And as the war went on and guys from our neighborhood came home (some did not) and I got older and heard the returning vets’ stories about the gore of combat and the tremendous number of casualties strictly due to military mismanagement and what we now call ““friendly fire,’’ it became plain to me that this was not like the tidy battlefield depicted in my dreadful poetry.

If you read the history and memoirs of the period you will find these rudimentary impressions confirmed. And if you read some of the less prettified narratives of what D-Day itself was like, the dispatch of vast numbers of youths to certain massacre – some terrified troops trying to swim back to their landing craft in what had become a sea of blood and crying out for their mothers – you will not immediately find yourself thinking, ““Gee, how much easier a time that must have been when a soldier or sailor could believe in the wisdom of his government and the rightness of its cause!’’ I am not saying that World War II was a mistaken endeavor for us. Finally, we had to go, and we should have. I am saying that under today’s rules of public discourse, everything we did, including our entry into the war, could have been deconstructed. Do you have any difficulty imagining the writers on the op-ed pages or the military personages on the Sunday TV talk shows explaining why a landing at Omaha Beach would be lethal and inconceivable?

There were choices, collective and personal, that had to be made in that war, and plenty of them were rotten choices because they had to be made in a deeply flawed world about lesser evils and greater goods. Many of the bedrock values we fought for then are at issue in other conflicts today. I don’t argue here that we should go plunging into any or all of them. But we shouldn’t use the idealization of that conflict 50 years ago to justify our detachment on grounds of moral worth. That’s phony.