War, huh. Good god. What is it good for?

War defines a generation; the Second World War pulled the country together in a sense of community so close that society has been seen as in decline since. The sixties was where Vietnam seeped into the world consciousness along with a mushroom cloud that cast a shadow across decades, and in the eighties, when the threat of nuclear death, if not vanished, then decreased to bearable levels, we also had the Falklands restoring faith in our armed forces superiority. It's depressing to think that the conflict that shadowed my teenage years, that divided public opinion, the most relevant and era-defining campaign during the nineties, was the Blur vs. Oasis chart battle.

Ok being the old bastard that I am, and the particular morbid child I was, I do remember the threat of a nuclear attack during the cold war, but dealing with your own mortality and imagining what it would feel like to have the flesh stripped from your bones, all before your tenth birthday is good for character. In the same way I think no one alive during the early nineties will forget the vicious and terrible images of the pseudo-mod wars. Some people may scoff, some may even go as far to say the whole thing was set up, a cynically motivated media stunt driven and invented by powerful and shadowy bastards who we will never see, a distraction from the things really going on, but let's face it, I've also just described the first season of Iraq TV War that piloted at the same time.