Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, recently lamented that American soldiers are far less willing to charge into battle nowadays. And you cannot. Combat when joined is dirty and painful, and casualties are almost a natural by-product. Vietnam was our television war, and televised combat scared the hell out of everybody. We're not close to figuring out a way to deal with what's going on in Bosnia, in all those places where people still slaughter one another in the name of ethnic cleansing or ancient grudges or greed or confusion.
Evil still rages in our world.
But at least we have never again used the most awful weapon we have and I doubt any American president would dare to authorize anything like the firebombing of civilian populations that FDR agreed to in Dresden and Tokyo and Johnson and Nixon ordered in Vietnam. It's not a lot of progress maybe, but it is progress, and I'm happy for it. The difference in sensibility over these five decades is for me crystallized in the monuments. Our primary memorial to the soldiers of World War II is the statue adjacent to Arlington Cemetery of the flagraising on Mt. Suribachi. The statue rests on a high pedestal and can be seen from far away.