Blog 3920 –  08.17.2026

Baby Boomers

My generation, the Baby Boomers, were born right after World War Two between the years of 1946 to 1964. Those of us who are still around almost daily read of one of our number passing. Most of the fifty thousand plus military personnel who died in the Vietnam War were Boomers. It was a great tragedy and the two and a half million Vietnamese casualties made it even more so. Those of us who served desperately want to believe that war was about more than making more millionaires in the U.S. than there had ever been or that we had at least learned our lesson about trading lives for dollars.

We have not it would seem. Like the “barn loser” in the parable it still seems to be all about the money with the billionaires still deciding who lives and who dies. I heard a military expert say recently that the U.S. would have to muster a force of a million combat personnel to match the Iranian Army. The generations since the Boomers are not only smaller, but far less inclined to believe the conflicts of the last fifty years have been noble and worth the lives they cost.

We pretend to care about our military personnel. If we did we’d be less inclined to use them and lose them in these senseless and unnecessary wars that only feed the military industrial complex and make mostly fat old white guys, fatter and richer.

Take it from an old Baby Boomers who has seen this scenario before and heard the drum beats of wars for profit. The rich get richer and the poor get folded flags for their babies, not a fair exchange.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White