How Much of Your Life Has the U.S. Spent in War?

During the drawdown of the Vietnam War, I recall feeling surreal about the U.S. not being at war, because, while we weren’t involved in Vietnam all my life, it sure felt like we were. That was an in-your-face war, with film footage dominating the evening news, war protesters, and fear of the draft. Times have changed. Journalist Martha Raddatz included this line in her commencement speech at Kenyon College:

You have spent more than half your lives with this country at war. And yet the huge majority of you, and those your age, the huge majority of all people in this country have not been affected by these conflicts.

The Washington Post, ever on alert for factual errors, checked to see if that was true. Students graduating from college in 2015 were mostly born in the early ‘90s, and have lived between 60 and 70 percent of their lives during the War on Terror. To see how this compares to other age groups, they made a table for all Americans born in the past 100 years. I see that while our country has been at war for 43% of my life, that figure is 83% for my two youngest children, born in 1998. The graph is a bit small in the image above, but you can see it much larger and read how it came about at The Washington Post.