Mark Steyn's 2001 Veteran's Day essay...

Mark Steyn's 2001 Veteran's Day essay...  It's an excellent piece that I'd not seen before, as I didn't know about Mark Steyn in 2001.  Here's a sample:

Actually, most Americans are already "aware" of their veterans, it's the elites who need reminding — like the chaps at The New York Times and other big papers who carry (by my estimation) less than a tenth of the military obituaries Britain's Daily Telegraph does. True, NBC's star anchor, Tom Brokaw, has found himself a lucrative franchise cranking out books about "The Greatest Generation" — the World War Two generation — but Brokaw's designation is absurd and essentially self-serving. The youthful Americans who went off to war 60 years ago would have thought it ridiculous to be hailed as "the greatest". They were unexceptional: they did no more or less than their own parents and grandparents had done. Like young men across the world, they accepted soldiering as an obligation of citizenship, as men have for centuries. In 1941, it would have astonished them to be told they would be the last generation to respect that basic social compact.

They understood that there are moments in a nation's history when even being a teenager is about standing up and declaring who you are by wearing a uniform. When we — their children and grandchildren — ennoble them as "the greatest" and elevate them into something extraordinary, it's a reflection mainly of our own stunted perspective.