The D-Day generation: a baby boomer pays tribute to the men and women who won World War II and built the peace.

• Author: Noonan, Peggy

I keep wondering about who we are these days, all of us. I keep wondering if we're way ahead of our parents--more learned, more tolerant, and engaged in the world--or way behind them. They touch my soul, that generation. They are an impenetrable inspiration. They got through the Depression and the war--they got drafted for five years and said Okay, Uncle Sam! and left, and wrote home. They expected so little, their assumptions were so modest. A lot of them, anyway. 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. They knew what they shared. When Communism fell we should have had a parade for them, for it meant their war was finally over. We should have one for them anyway, before they leave.

They weren't farmers, or the ones I knew weren't farmers, but they were somehow--closer to the soil, closer to the ground. The ones in Brooklyn, Rochester, wherever, they were closer to the ground.

Affluence detaches. It removes you from the old and eternal, it gets you out of the rain. Affluence and technology detach absolutely. 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. Anyway, the guy who said "Plastics" to Benjamin 25 years ago in The Graduate was speaking more truth than we knew.

Also, our parents were ethnic in a way I understood. 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. Everyone knew they were superior, so everyone got along. I think the prevailing feeling was, everyone's human. Actually, that used to be a saying in America: Everyone's human.

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 Americans. Which we certainly have. A while ago a reporter told me how an old Boston pol summed up Mario Cuomo. The pol said, "He's not a real ethnic. He's never been ashamed of his father." The reporter--45, New York, Jewish--laughed with a delighted grunt. The ordeal of ethnicity. I Remember Papa.

There were ethnic, religious, and racial resentments, but you didn't hear about them all the time. It was a more reticent country. Imagine chatty America being reticent. But it was.

I often want...