Somehow I have no living memory of the Vietnam War. I was seven and a half years old when it ended in 1975, so it would stand to reason that there would be something, some kind of vague recollection tethered to my consciousness. After all, fragments of other momentous events from that year, or even before, are still rattling around in my head.
I remember listening to the Watergate hearings when my mom left the key in the ignition and the AM radio on in our `69 Buick LeSabre as she ran into the store; and I know what the under-40 readers are thinking, but things were different back then. Nobody used seat belts, either.
I remember being dropped off at my grandmother’s apartment to find that regular, late-morning kids’ programming on her black and white rabbit eared TV had been pre-empted by some horses pulling a wagon with a flag draped over it; she and my father explained that it was the funeral for former President Johnson, and then dad went off to work and I found a coloring book.
I even remember the older boys in school talking about Patty Hearst as she was running around California, holding up banks with the Symbionese Liberation Army; mostly they debated whether or not she was foxy.
But I don’t remember a goddamn thing about the Vietnam War. No television footage, no screaming headlines, no shots of that helicopter being pushed into the water as the Americans evacuated Saigon. Nothing.
It’s one of those weird things I can’t really explain, the major cultural/political event of my early childhood being completely absent from my mental scrapbook: the missing memory.
But no matter. Since then, there have been plenty of other U.S. wars for me to remember.
I remember getting my cherry popped in high school when Reagan sent the military down to the tiny Caribbean island of Granada to topple their new leftist government. His excuse was some nonsense about protecting a handful of American students at a third-rate medical school.
I remember George Herbert Walker Bush launching Operation Just Cause and sending our troops to literally arrest President Manuel Noriega of Panama. Noriega ended up in a Florida Prison, and a soldier who was there later told me that they used to mock the mission as Operation Just Because.
I remember the next year, Bush Sr. proclaiming that he was drawing a line in the sand and that this aggression would not stand, as he sent our mighty military to Iraq for the first Gulf War. The elder Bush clearly did not take kindly to having dictators we’d helped install and support thumb their noses at us, especially when cocaine or oil was involved.
I remember William Jefferson Clinton sending the military on short missions in a variety of places where things had gone horribly wrong, notably Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Haiti, and Kossovo. And we’re still left wondering how those merited action when the genocide in Rwanda apparently did not.
I remember the nation being almost completely united behind Bush’s son when he sent our troops to Afghanistan in 2001. During my lifetime, nothing has come remotely close to uniting this country the way September 11 did.
I also remember shortly thereafter not believing any of Junior’s bullshit excuses for dividing the nation, pissing away all the international goodwill we’d built up, and diverting our national attention 
and military effort away from Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Al Quaeda by launching a full scale invasion of Iraq. Of course the nation is no longer very divided about it; almost everyone now realizes what a bad idea and colossal blunder that one was.
So here we stand in late March of 2011, and another military intervention is underway. Just past the midway point in his first term, President Obama still has our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and now he’s adding air strikes against Libya to his resume, claiming the first initiation of American military violence abroad during his watch.
At first glance, this seems to have more in common with the violence we’ve committed in the name of humanitarian measures, as opposed to the ones about bloody vengeance or utter nonsense. And 
while that’s a better a category to be in, it doesn’t make me happy. I’m in no mood to celebrate.
I yearn for the days of Vietnam, when war was yet unknown to me. When the world was still a peaceful place in my eyes. When a child could listen to the radio and play with the lap belts that were otherwise buried deep within the crevices of a bench seat, or try to color between the lines with crayons as white horses slowly clopped down the street.
I don’t want any more of these new memories.