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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:56PM
I honestly have NOT forgotten the Russians. Russia has just recently completed their Memorial Day observances, complete with the parades in Red Square. I "observed" a lot of that on Russian Times. The commentary posted to the articles was often embarrassing - US people posted a lot of hateful crap, and some Euros did as well. For my part, I posted little, and what I posted was respectful.
As bad as my kinfolk had it during WW2 (mostly in the Pacific, fighting Japanese) it doesn't hold a candle to ten divisions sweeping across the homeland, and placing the capital under seige.
And, of course, the Chinese didn't have it any better.