Thoughts on conflict

I've been studying for an exam in my insurgency, terrorism and guerrilla warfare class, and what has struck me in our group get-togethers is how in discussions of the Vietnam war, my fellow students always talk about what "we" did, referring to the US side. This gives me some pause in two ways: first, it doesn't seem like the best thing in academically dissecting a conflict to identify with one of the parties involved; and second, how much can college students in 2006 make claim to be part of a US war effort in the 1960s and '70s? None of the people in my small study group were even alive during the Tet offensive, yet we talk about it in terms of "when they attacked us." What is it about our conflict discourse that makes a bunch of early-20-somethings identify so strongly with something that happened almost 40 years ago? I wonder what effect this nationalist sense of self and history has on the capacity of the united states to start and continue wars. Much has been said, after all, of the theory that the defense department neocons are in a way trying in Iraq to do Vietnam right, that they are perhaps through this current conflict trying to make up for failures in the other. If young people not directly associated with the old war feel so strongly about it as to feel attacked in Tet, though, perhaps we ought to consider that it is more broadly the national psyche as a whole that is trying to get revenge in Iraq. That kind of determination may be harder to break than the few misguided old codgers in the Pentagon.