How will younger generations of Americans regard the conflict?

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Editor’s Note: The final of a four-part series. Read parts 1, 2, and 3.

Long, long ago, in an America far, far away, I got my first job: working in a bookstore in a new shopping mall. Mainly we had shelves, miles and miles of shelves, along the walls and across the aisles, but we also had a couple of rotating racks, and one of those was devoted to a series of books: Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century.