Nash: Memorial Day — Greatest Generation’s WWII stories live on as long as we retell them

THIS MEMORIAL DAY will see far fewer living veterans of World War II, with just over 60,000 still alive in the U.S. today. An article in The Mendocino Voice leading up to Memorial Day 2023 reported that Fort Bragg American Legion Post Sequoia #96 no longer had any living WWII vets among its membership.

For most of us in the Baby Boomer generation, the Second World War was never very far away. Although there are lots of theories — aside from the obvious — as to why people started making babies like bunnies in 1946, there’s no dispute that the birth rate spiked immediately after the war and stayed high until falling off in the mid-1960s. When someone referred to “the war,” we all knew which war they meant.