The D-Day Generation
Noonan, Peggy
The D-Day Generation A baby boomer pays tribute to the men and women who won World War II and built the peace BY PEGGY NOONAN I keep wondering about who we are these days, all of us. I keep...
...and left, and wrote home...
...But, you know, they're still reticent...
...We'd already done the work and left by the time the writers came...
...They expected so little, their assumptions were so modest...
...My father—army infantry, Italy under Blood 'n' Guts—has a small apartment in Santo Domingo and swims and says he can feel the sun to his bones...
...Back in that old world the Irish knew they were better than the Italians and the Italians knew they were better than the Irish and we all knew we were better than the Jews and they knew they were better than us...
...The reporter—45, New York, Jewish—laughed with a delighted grunt...
...It removes you from the old and eternal, it gets you out of the rain...
...They weren't farmers, or the ones I knew weren't farmers, but they were somehow—closer to the soil, closer to the ground...
...He had an old brick house off George Washington Parkway and I had walked through it...
...I keep wondering if we're way ahead of our parents—more learned, more tolerant, and engaged in the world—or way behind them...
...I think the prevailing feeling was, everyone's human...
...There are always serious and individual reasons for such things, but I would include the seventies, the decade when America went crazy, the decade when, as John Updike said, the sixties had finally percolated down to everybody...
...it was perfect but too near the highway for a woman with a two-year-old...
...Affluence and technology detach absolutely...
...They all knew they were Americans and they all knew they weren't, and their kids knew it too, and understood it was their job to become the Peggy Noonan is a former speechwriter for President Reagan...
...Americans...
...I often want to say to them, to my parents and the parents of my friends, Share your wisdom, tell me what you've learned, tell me what we're doing wrong and right...
...And one of the old framed papers said Guadalcanal, and this was exciting, so I said to him, for the most interesting things you hear in life come by accident, "Did you know Richard Tregaskis...
...The ordeal of ethnicity...
...We should have one for them anyway, before they leave...
...They are an impenetrable inspiration...
...Imagine chatty America being reticent...
...The ones in Brooklyn, Rochester, wherever, they were closer to the ground...
...They touch my soul, that generation...
...When Communism fell we should have had a parade for them, for it meant their war was finally over...
...There was more divorce than I think we've noted in our parents' generation, and a lot of them did it in a funny way, not after a year or 10 years but after 25, 35 years...
...Reprinted by permission of Random House...
...He's never been ashamed of his father...
...The pol said, "He's not a real ethnic...
...And the squint gets deeper and he says, "Yeah, well, I was a grunt...
...I sort of smiled and asked if I could use the bathroom, where I plucked a piece of shrapnel from my heart...
...Loose lips sink ships...
...And his good eye squinted, I thought he might not recognize the reference, so I said to him, "He was the one who wrote Guadalcanal Diary...
...It was a more reticent country...
...Affluence detaches...
...Now they're all retired, and most of the ones I know are in pretty good shape...
...They got through the Depression and the war—they got drafted for five years and said Okay, Uncle Sam...
...When I was in the basement I saw his World War II memorabilia—he still had framed citations on the wall, and I could see he'd seen action island-hopping in the South Pacific...
...They own their house...
...Anyway, the guy who said "Plastics" to Benjamin 25 years ago in The Graduate was speaking more truth than we knew...
...They didn't have time, or take time, to reflect...
...But it was...
...The women shared the common trauma of a childhood in hard times and the men had the common integrator of the barracks, and I feel that they understood each other...
...There were ethnic, religious, and racial resentments, but you didn't hear about them all the time...
...Adapted from the book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, © 1994 by Peggy Noonan...
...They knew what they shared...
...He's happy...
...Also, they tend not to have big abstract things to say about life because they were actually busy living it, and forgot to take notes...
...Lisa's parents just got back from Europe...
...A lot of them, anyway...
...Among other things, they get you playing with thin plastic things like Super Nintendo and not solid things like—I don't know—wood, and water...
...Actually, that used to be a saying in America: Everyone's human...
...Which we certainly have...
...Everyone knew they were superior, so everyone got along...
...I Remember Papa...
...He had gray hair and was stooped in a crouched, still-muscular way and had just one good eye, the other was scarred and blind...
...Also, our parents were ethnic in a way I understood...
...They're like an old guy I met a few years ago when I was looking for a house in Washington...
...George's father, who for 25 years worked in a Newark welfare office, married a woman with a farm in Pennsylvania...
...My mother lives here in town and flies off when one of her children is having a baby, to be a continuity, to say by her presence, We did this too, years ago, so don't worry...
...A while ago a reporter told me how an old Boston pol summed up Mario Cuomo...
...After a life...
...Now he walks in the mud in big rubber boots, holding a piece of corn...
...My friend Susan's parents go to Atlantic City and catch a few shows, play the slots...
...They were not so inclined...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 6
