A USA where war seemed unthinkable...

[Bonobo]

Yes, Virginia, if you are just the right age, like me, you may just have experienced a few years when you thought that was was unthinkable, silly and never to happen again.

Sigh, I remember, after long years of peace with Carter, when the Falklands happened. It seemed like a silly war, hard to believe it was real.

War seemed so preposterous. As a young person, I never thought it would happen again to the US.

Sure I had grown up with the fear of nuclear devastation with a war with the Soviet Union -everyone did, but I was a little too young to remember Vietnam (I was born in 1966), but old enough to be fully aware of Jimmy Carter and what he was about.

For a few brief years, it seemed like the US wasn't going to be involved in any real wars.

Now, anyone under 30 can't even remember NOT being at war, nor can they imagine a country that doesn't bomb and kill civilians with the flimsy excuse of "protecting our freedoms".

How fucking sad is THAT?

[MineralMan]

1. I can't ever remember such a time.

I was born in 1945, so I'm somewhat older than you. Here's what I remember: Duck and Cover drills in my grammar school classrooms and my father building a serious fallout shelter under our house in 1960.

There's always some war threatening on the horizon. Always. I don't think that's about to change. It is the state of the world we live in. My parents were born shortly after WWI. My dad flew B-17s in WWII, and then had to worry about getting called back for Korea. Then there was Vietnam, and so on and so on. There are always wars and rumors of wars. Some we get involved in. Others we don't. But there are always wars about to start or underway. It's a screwed up world, this one we inhabit.

[Harmony Blue]

2. Has anyone read the book "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society"

by Dave Grossman?

The gist of his argument in a certain segment of the book was very interesting. He argued that killing rates are directly proportional to distance. Combat currently is based on large distances, thus killing rates are soaring and why we are involved in so many wars now.

[MadHound]

3. Perhaps you were too young to remember,

But even in those "golden years" we were at war. Granted, they were covert wars that didn't get much play in the media, but they were still going on, and those of us who had an an ear to the ground knew they were going on.

[masmdu]

4. War is good for business, if it wasn't it wouldn't happen.

(BTW, how's life in Japan?)

[reggie the dog]

5. I am 32 and technically the usa has not had a single war in my lifetime

but our troops have invaded grenada, panama, iraq 2 times, kuwait, afghanistan, yugoslavia, Somalia, and we have bombed pakistan, and libya too and i am probably forgetting some countries, but like i said, these have never ever been WARS, as in CONGRESS has never DECLARED WAR during my lifetime. From what i see each president just gets to decide who he would like to bomb and then does it and asks congress for money for it after the fact.

[WinkyDink]

6. The Falklands war did not involve the US. Moreover, we were not at war from 1992- early 2003.

Hardly 30 years ago.