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How Much of Your Lifetime Has the USA Been at War?

posted by janrinok on Monday June 22 2015, @08:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-much?? dept.

"gewg_" writes:

The Washington Post reports

A simple data point offered by a college commencement speaker jumped out at [non-employee Washington Post contributor Philip Bump] before being borne away on the tide of immediacy.

[...]The speaker was ABC journalist Martha Raddatz, and the point is [...]: The graduates have spent half their lives with America at war.

It's a startling idea, but an incorrect one. The percentage is almost certainly much higher than that.

Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war"--Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example--we endeavored to figure out how much of each person's life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.

The page contains a graphic that allows you to see what portion of your lifetime the USA has been formally engaged in hostilities according to your birth year.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Reziac on Tuesday June 23 2015, @12:13AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @12:13AM (#199662) Homepage

    Yeah, I think if you count the War on Terror (IMO a stretch), you have to count the Cold War. Or don't count both.

    I remember the air raid sirens still being tested every Sunday at noon. Wonder how many of these younger non-mil folks have even that much experience of the real thing.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by istartedi on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:07AM

    by istartedi (123) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:07AM (#199753) Journal

    I grew up in the DC area. We had the CD siren tests every month, tension with the USSR, and let's not forget our meddling in Central America which was a proxy war with the USSR. There was this guy in our school who said, "I'm going to go to El Salvador and get myself killed". He was otherwise a very fun person; so this was an oddly dark thing to say. Also, we were backing the Mujahedin in Afghanistan which would later haunt us.

    Anyway, even "peace" had a lot of fighting. Oh, a bunch of Marines got killed in 1983 in Beirut [wikipedia.org]. Let's see... there was Grenada, and I'd be surprised if we didn't do something in Haiti during the "peace" period. We always do something in Haiti eventually. I'm probably forgetting a lot of stuff. Oh, oh.... Somalia.

    Yep. Peace. Not a lot of it, really.

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  • (Score: 1) by bucket58 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:54PM

    by bucket58 (1305) on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:54PM (#199943)

    Where I live, they still test them every month on the first Monday at noon. They are mostly there for tornado alerts, but they have an alternate sound pattern for Civil Defense mode.