This would have been a different Memorial Day column 30 years ago.

Those of us who are 50 years old today were in a far different place then.

We'd seen many of our older brothers and relatives and their friends return from Vietnam, and we didn't know how to treat them.

We hadn't exactly won the war, which most of us thought we shouldn't have entered. While our servicemen were overseas battling the Vietcong and Communism, we were fighting among ourselves in the streets and on college campuses across the country. And maybe you argued with your parents in the kitchen or in the driveway.

A lot of our friends and brothers came back to a country that had changed as much as they had. They were altered by what they'd seen, what they'd done and what they'd been told. Same with us.

But a lot of them came home dead. Some from my hometown. Some from yours.

This was before the "Greatest Generation" name had made certifiable and rightful heroes of the American fighting force of World War II. And this was before our nation knew that our leadership had lied to us about what had happened in the jungles and rice paddies and villages and mountains of Southeast Asia.

The military draft had just ended, replaced in 1973 by the all-volunteer military that still fights our country's battles.

Today, a lot of us probably still carry our Selective Service cards, as reminders of how close we came, and what could have been.

Joining the military — serving our country, as our fathers and uncles and brothers and cousins had done for generations — was on very few to-do lists in my circle of friends.

So if you had suggested that we'd been scared off by what we'd been through in the 1960s and early 1970s, you would have been right. We were scared.

On top of that, we had no idea of who we were. And we sure as hell didn't know what we stood for, except that it didn't involve carrying a grenade launcher, or attending our own military funeral.

For the first time in a century — since the Civil War — our country had been torn apart, and our mini-generation was on the inside, looking out.

That's neither right or wrong. It was what it was.

But it's why I struggle with Memorial Day.

It's impossible to not be thankful for the sacrifices of others who saved our freedoms and spread them around the globe. And we are.

It's heartening to know that we live in a country that allows the freedom to dissent when we're sending our armed forces to unpopular wars. And we have exercised that freedom.

It's humbling to know that we elect leaders who accept the responsibility of putting our sons and daughters, neighbors and colleagues in harm's way, aware that they could die while fighting to protect someone they've never met. And that burden cannot be overlooked.

I struggle with Memorial Day because I grew up in an era that gave short shrift to the difficult, often thankless work that soldiers do, while we did the minimum to keep our country strong, to honor their sacrifice.

We didn't do our part.

It was good that we eventually saw war for what it can be.

It was not good that it altered our perception, for even a second, of what we ask those men and women to do for us.

As we observe this Memorial Day against the backdrop of Fox Valley casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, keep that in mind.

Someone — your grandson, your sister, your neighbor's nephew, your boss's sister's daughter — is looking out for you.

They asked for the job.

They deserve your respect.

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