My boy graduated from high school last spring. As I stared at his diploma, it occurred to me that he had something in common with both me and his grandmother, who still travels the world at age 83. The three of us came of age with our nation at war.

For my mother, it was World War II. She's told me of the rationing of butter, meat and gasoline, and of the boys she grew up with who died for their country.

When she went off to college in the fall of 1941, New York City was teeming with soldiers, many from allied countries. She and her friends volunteered occasionally as hostesses at nightly "canteens"sponsored by the all-female Three Arts Club. Servicemen could visit these canteens around the city for free food, music, dancing and smart, pretty girls to talk with while on leave or waiting to be shipped out.

Mother still shakes her head remembering one group, all lost at sea when their troop ship was torpedoed a few days after they visited her club's canteen.

Sixty years later, mother found herself living on a small island in Japan, serving as a missionary at a church among a people she had deeply hated. She couldn't get the Bataan Death March off her mind. Some who attended were once soldiers who had killed Americans. It took a while, she says, but she grew to love these Japanese people and was able to put sad memories behind her. Such are the mysterious ways of the Lord.

Then came Vietnam, sucking some of the finest from my generation into what became a no-win, seemingly endless, human meat-grinder, full of napalm, midnight firefights, jungle tripwires, mortar attacks and land mines that popped up to blow out a man's guts when activated.

I did not go to Vietnam, but some of my friends did. Several died there, others died years later but still too young from what I suspect were delayed reactions to jungle warfare - malaria, alcoholism, drugs and exposure to defoliants that cleared jungle vegetation to make it easier to target the enemy. Some returned "not quite right"emotionally.

The majority, most of whom I served with in the National Guard, looked proudly at their Vietnam service as a valuable, necessary enterprise on behalf of their country. I've always believed it was heroic service.

Now my daughter's best friend is a pretty, talented young lady whose given name I cannot pronounce. She was born 17 years ago in, of all places, Vietnam. Once we were killing them and they were

killing us, and now our kids are eating spicy noodles together at sleepovers. The history of the world is full of such incomprehensible trickery.

As my boy moves into adulthood with others of his generation, thirsting for adventure, eyes wide with expectation, he is finding the world as dangerous and as unpredictable as it has ever been. Lunatic despots building nuclear warheads to shoot at us. Fanatics chopping off people's heads on television. Odd men living in caves, plotting to crash planeloads of people into our cities.

If he's fortunate and survives, even prospers through all this, as many do even in the worst of times, he will see that all in this world is not necessarily as it appears, and sometimes things that start badly can turn out good, or at least better than one might have thought. He may grow to appreciate these lines by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a voice from a generation that also had its hands full with a world catastrophe, Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars."

"Well - many are dead, and some I have quarreled with and don't see anymore. But I have never cared for any . . . as much as these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer . . . in a line of Willa Cather's: 'We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.'"

A war to end all wars? They should have known better.

(Dean Dexter is a freelance writer and insurance company manager. He lives in Penacook.)(next page »)