On the home front: all glory, no guts. For most of Americans, freeing Kuwait was just another free ride.

• Author: Fallows, James

James Fallows is the Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. This piece is an expansion of a commentary the author did for National Public Radio.

During the six weeks of combat in the Persian Gulf, one of the local TV news stations in Washington ran a promotional clip with a wartime theme. It showed its broadcasters in pensive poses, had a flag flapping in the background, and then ran its slogan: "We'll get through this together."

It was done nicely enough, and was the sort of thing that must have been common during World War II. The tone it evoked was of loyal citizens bundling bandages on the home front while waiting for the troops to return. Watching it, I realized that I had never seen such an announcement, with its emphasis on everyone helping each other through a shared and difficult experience, during the Vietnam war.

The only problem with the ad was that it was a lie. Half a million soldiers were getting through something difficult and dangerous in the desert. Their families were disrupted, worried, and sometimes grieved. But the country as a whole was not "getting through" anything in particular. Indeed, the ability to feel, in a self-dramatizing "get through this together" way, like a country at war, without exposing anyone except the soldiers and their families to the inconveniences or rigors of real war, points to one of the strangest twists of our recent polities.

While the fighting was under way, there was no shortage of stoic imagery suggesting, as did the TV ad, that everyone was pulling together to get the job done. A Washington Post travel writer, without the slightest hint of irony, said in a column that he would do his part by "hop-scotching down the South American continent" on a U.S.-owned airline. "To stay home, in my opinion, is to bow to Saddam Hussein's threats," he explained. "I don't plan to yield to the Iraqi leader's intimidation, but of course that is a personal decision." Not everyone could be expected to be quite so brave. But many were! A spokesman for the Vail ski resort in Colorado said that, despite the dangers of travel, "People are still coming, and they are coming strong. We feel very, very fortunate."

My point about wartime sacrifice is not the familiar "class war" theme about who is in the army and who is on the slopes. Rather it concerns the bizarre struck-by-lightning nature of "getting through" this war: if you or your loved ones were not in Saudi Arabia, you were not involved at all. Duty free

The 500,000 soldiers in the Gulf made up one-fifth of one percent of the American public. If we assume, generously, that each of...