Anyone whose parents belonged to the generation that Tom Brokaw chronicles in The Greatest Generation has heard many times a phrase about the struggles they faced: "You kids don't know what it was like."
They're right. We don't. And the newscaster Tom Brokaw reminds us why we don't have to: The Americans he rightly calls the greatest generation not only prevailed against extraordinary odds and by extraordinary sacrifices, but built a nation strong enough to spare their children and generations to come similar struggles. Our generation doesn't "know what it was like" because their generation did know what it was like -- and made sure we wouldn't.
Brokaw's new collection of essays about these exceptional people is an antidote to three poisons that can corrode America's memory -- and thereby its capacity for greatness.
The first is the sanitizing of sacrifice. The epic struggle of that generation is often stored in a rose-colored display case that romanticizes the profound human suffering that was the cost of their triumphs. In American popular culture, the classic image of World War II is the homecoming GI kissing his bride in Times Square, not the carnage on Omaha Beach or the slaughter in the Mariana Islands. Yet the cost of the victory was real, a price exacted in human suffering of which Brokaw painstakingly reminds us. On the home front, for those of us who have never known the combination of emptiness and anxiety that strikes the stomachs of people who have to worry about the source of their next meal, Brokaw brings to vivid reality the life of those who survived the Depression before winning the war.
The second poison to which Brokaw provides an antidote is a crippling cynicism about our capacity to achieve great things. Brokaw writes movingly of his experiences covering the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day for NBC. On the second occasion, while Brokaw was in Normandy, I was in Nebraska at a commemoration of the same event. I struggled without success to hold back tears as veterans of the invasion described in harrowing detail the sound of bullets spraying across the water in front of them and ripping through flesh. They told of their landing craft racing across the English Channel amidst those sounds and of the decision they faced: whether at that vital moment for humanity to open the hatches and race forward into what must have seemed like certain death. They did, and humanity was saved.
But Brokaw attaches names and faces and human lives to that sterile pronoun "they." Sam Gibbons did. Gordon Larsen did, island-hopping in the Pacific campaign. Bob Bush did on Okinawa. Mark Hatfield did on Iwo Jima. And they told their tales to Brokaw first-hand.
Others couldn't. Raymond Russell Kelley, killed in France. Camille Gagne, killed at the Rhine River, whose wife Jeanette reminds us of victory's price: "When the war was over everyone was honking their horns and yelling . . . I couldn't really join," she says. "My heart wasn't in it."
Those of us who have lived through combat will recognize in these stories the true price of war. Veterans of that generation do not boast of their exploits at war -- because they have a deep humility, yes, but also, I suspect, because their scars are deep and their pain is intensely, intimately private.
My father served in the Pacific during the war. His brother was killed there, one of the 50 million consumed by the conflagration. But I did not even know that his brother had existed until, at age ten, I found a chest of his belongings. And when I asked my father about them, I was rebuffed with a face of anger and regret I will never forget. We did not talk about war on that day. We did not talk about war on that day. I left to fight in my own. We never talked about war -- until my father was on his deathbed and I was running for the Senate.
Brokaw has drawn from the reservoir of painful memories as much as his subjects were willing to yield, and we are the better for it. It was not possible to hear those stories at the commemoration in Nebraska -- just as it is not possible to read The Greatest Generation -- and remain a cynic. The men and women of that generation sowed the seeds of a lasting national confidence. A nation capable of producing such men and such women is capable of producing anything -- if it is willing to pay the price.
The third potential poison to which Brokaw provides an antidote is the one most important for me personally, and perhaps the one most important to the entire nation: the belief that the only heroism worth honoring occurs on the battlefield.
The Greatest Generation reminds us that heroism and courage are not byproducts of war alone, but of daily life as well, of the unnoticed decisions and actions taken when the cameras are not clicking. Americans today too lazily believe that heroes are forged only in the blazing crucible of war, rather than -- as is just as often the case -- in the sunshine of opportunity or the cold, hard struggles at home.
Here are Brokaw's heroes: Dorothy Haener, who worked at a Ford plant producing B-24 bombers. She was fired when the war ended and the company decided to give the jobs for which the women were hired to returning servicemen instead. She became a union organizer and bore the sacrifices of a battle to make the labor union hospitable to women. Another is Charles Van Gorder, a surgeon whose heroism in setting up medical facilities in the middle of the D-Day fighting was followed on his return home by heroism in forgoing a lucrative New York surgery fellowship in favor of building a clinic in Andrews, North Carolina.
Brokaw shows us the patriotism produced by the war, but these and other characters remind me of another kind of patriotism, too. It is one that I discovered myself, in my journey from a blind patriotism to a feeling of betrayal and bitterness, and back to an over-powering love of this country.
Brokaw and I are children of the greatest generation and from the same region of America's heartland: he from Yankton, South Dakota, and I from Lincoln, Nebraska. I was raised with an instinctive patriotism. Our parents' generation returned home proud and patriotic, and they had earned it. They had quite literally saved the world, and I saluted the flag when it came by. It was 1989 before I met my first living Communist, but I considered communism a threat and I was prepared to do my duty to fight it. I never doubted the rightness of my country and its leaders.
In 1965, I got a letter in the mail from a government agency offering me a free physical examination. I passed, volunteered for the Navy and then for underwater demolition training. By the time I arrived in Vietnam, my self-image was of the gallant warrior riding off to save his country. When I was shipped back on a stretcher facing the loss of a limb -- and more important, having already experienced the loss of innocence -- my world collapsed. I couldn't walk, couldn't leave my bed, couldn't go to the bathroom without asking others for help.
As I recovered, I learned about my war. The war fought by my father seemed a national passion waged with moral clarity. Mine seemed waged on political lies that extinguished the patriotic love that had burned in my heart.
In time, two things changed my view. The first was that my country saved my life. The hospital where I recovered, the doctors who worked on me, the nurses whose hands on my shoulder comforted me through the worst nights, were all there thanks to a law passed because this was the kind of country my fellow citizens wanted to build: a place where someone like me, who had never made a contribution to a politician, deserved to have his life saved. The second was that in time -- though I still considered my war a terrible mistake -- I came to understand the bravery of young men and women willing to risk everything they had for the freedom of people they did not know.
These discoveries melted into a patriotism of choice based on my own conscience rather than others' commands and a love of country that exceeded any I had ever felt before.
That is the patriotism Tom Brokaw has unearthed in The Greatest Generation. It is the patriotism of Sam Gibbons, who parachuted behind the D-Day lines to fight for freedom and then returned home to dedicate his life to the freedom of others. It is the patriotism of Dorothy Haener, who helped win the war abroad and then risked discomfort and criticism to fight for justice at home. And it is the patriotism of Dr. Charles Van Gorder, who risked his life to save others' abroad and then decided to forgo the rich future that was his due to save lives in relative obscurity in the mountains of North Carolina.
Joseph Brodsky, the expatriate Russian poet, defined decadence as forgetting what we have the capacity to remember. Tom Brokaw's accomplishment is to make us remember both that the sacrifices made by the greatest generation were great and that they were so numerous and so frequent it is impossible to know them all. Anyone who has seen the field of white crosses at the American military cemetery in Normandy knows these are sacrifices drenched in anonymity. At home, the Depression -- and then the era of prosperity that the greatest generation seized to build a nation -- were so pervasive that individual glory disappears in the bright glow of events.
Brokaw has pulled these everyday episodes of heroism out of anonymity and given them names. In giving them names, he gives us the remembrance of a patriotism they created but we can harness.
That is the greatest gift the greatest generation has to offer us, the kids who didn't know what it was like.
J. Robert Kerrey is the senior U.S. senator from Nebraska and holds the Congressional Medal of Honor.