Losing Private Ryan

THE war over Kosovo was indeed a peculiar one, as its aftermath proved. It was the first American war fought and won without a single U.S. combat casualty, and it was the first one conducted from start to finish without engaging the passions of the American people. Victory prompted not celebrations but sighs of relief. Rather than put on a parade up Fifth Avenue, marking “V-K Day,” the nation—-bored, impatient, and slightly embarrassed—chose to concentrate on summer vacation.

The Kosovo war was also our first not to produce a single bona fide hero. The pilots who executed the air campaign remain shrouded in anonymity, as remote from the average American as they themselves were from the targets they obliterated in Serbia. When the air squadrons that carried the brunt of the war rotated back from the combat zone, newspapers were content to report their homecoming via brief, colorless wire-service dispatches, printed on the inside pages.

AJ

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Andrew J. Bacevich

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THE war over Kosovo was indeed a peculiar one, as its aftermath proved. It was the first American war fought and won without a single U.S. combat casualty, and it was the first one conducted from start to finish without engaging the passions of the American people. Victory prompted not celebrations but sighs of relief. Rather than put on a parade up Fifth Avenue, marking “V-K Day,” the nation—-bored, impatient, and slightly embarrassed—chose to concentrate on summer vacation.

The Kosovo war was also our first not to produce a single bona fide hero. The pilots who executed the air campaign remain shrouded in anonymity, as remote from the average American as they themselves were from the targets they obliterated in Serbia. When the air squadrons that carried the brunt of the war rotated back from the combat zone, newspapers were content to report their homecoming via brief, colorless wire-service dispatches, printed on the inside pages.