![]() ![]() When one directs attention to the Black experience, Delmont writes, ‘nearly everything’ about that war looks different. Although more than a million African Americans served in the armed forces during the Second World War, the default soldier in representations of the war is almost always white. ![]() Delmont’s Half American, the greatest generation, or at least its white component, seems considerably diminished. Its legacy, reinforced by misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ – a reluctance among political leaders and the broader public to become involved in combat in faraway places. The war in Vietnam, by contrast, is widely viewed as a needless contest fought by an army that fell apart while experiencing the aftershocks of social divisions at home. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. I n American popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’.
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