Earlier this week, Josh Marshall reminded us that Monday night was the 20th anniversary of the start of the Persian Gulf War, and then he remarked that he’s “not sure which is more surprising: that there’s not a peep about this in the news or that, my god, the Gulf War was 20 years ago.”

I second that on all counts.

Twenty years… is that even possible? That’s roughly the same temporal distance that separated the Vietnam War from the Gulf War, and at the time the Gulf War was taking place, Vietnam seemed like ancient history to this very young man. Very relevant history (or so I thought at the time), but ancient nonetheless. And now I guess that dark January night in 1991 when I listened to the aerial bombardment of Baghdad live on my car radio must seem like ancient history to some other young man. And yet I remember it all so clearly. How could I not? Everything that was happening during that period — both in my personal life and on the worldwide scale — loomed very, very large in my mind. It all seemed so significant.

I was 21 years old as that uncertain new year began, but not nearly as mature as you might expect for someone of that age. Truthfully, I was probably more at the emotional level of the teenage kids I worked with at Movies 7 (soon to become Movies 9 with the addition of two new auditoriums!) than on par with my classmates at the U of U. Instead of setting post-graduation goals or thinking seriously about finding a real job, as a 21-year-old man should’ve been doing, I’d spent most of the past year in a tailspin because my first serious relationship with a girl had come to its final, crashing end the previous spring. I was so mired in self-pity that I doubt if I even noticed the news reports of Saddam Hussein’s forces invading a tiny little country nobody had ever heard of. That Kuwait place was on the other side of the world, for god’s sake, and I had things closer to home to worry about, like the fact that I was very likely never going to have sex ever again.

By fall, however, with the rhetoric heating up and U.S. soldiers massing in Saudi Arabia, even I could no longer ignore the obvious: my country was headed for war.

I’m old enough to have been around for the end of the Vietnam War — I even have dim memories of seeing those last frantic chopper flights out of Saigon on television — but I was very small when all that happened, and hadn’t really understood what was going on. Operation Desert Storm was different. Now I was old enough to comprehend exactly what was happening, and to have an opinion about it. I was young, idealistic yet prone by nature to a darker view of the world, and steeped in the lore of the 1960s, thanks to the stranglehold the Baby Boomers held on popular culture in the late ’80s, so naturally I couldn’t help but see Desert Storm as my generation’s Vietnam. And I reacted to the coming of war as I thought any intelligent, politically aware college-age person was supposed to. I opposed it.

I signed petitions; I attended protest rallies at the student union; I went to a Q&A session with Representative Wayne Owens, one of Utah’s few Democratic congressmen and an opponent of the war policy; and I started spouting simplistic slogans like “No blood for oil!” Because of course a war in the Middle East ultimately had to be about oil, right? Oh, and I also started arguing with my friends at the theater, who shocked me by turning out to be far more hawkish — far more conservative in general — than I’d realized.

Looking back now, I’m willing to admit that my motives weren’t as moral or logical as I believed at the time. I may have been saying high-minded things about the barbarism of resorting to arms and how I thought diplomacy was the best solution to any dispute, but the truth is, I was just plain scared. The Iraqis were said to be battle-hardened after their eight-year war with Iran; Saddam was known to have nerve-gas weapons, among god-knows-what-else; and the Middle East has always been a pan of gasoline waiting for some stupid superpower to come along and drop a cigarette butt. It was all too easy for me to imagine our little Kuwaiti adventure spiraling outward until it absorbed everybody; I honestly believed we could be on the verge of World War III. Or that our overconfidence could lead us into a desert quagmire that would grind on for bloody year after bloody year. Yes, I was a victim of the dreaded Vietnam Syndrome. But could you blame me? Pop culture had been feeding me a steady diet of ‘Nam rehashes for the past few years, everything from feature films (Platoon, Casualties of War, Full Metal Jacket) to weekly television series (Tour of Duty, China Beach, and The Wonder Years, not to mention occasional ‘Nam-themed episodes of Quantum Leap, Magnum, PI, etc.). I’d recently taken a college class on the subject, and I’d watched the entire PBS documentary series Vietnam: A Television History. And then there was the influence of my late uncle Louie.

Lou was a Vietnam vet, an infantryman who’d seen some bad shit and was still struggling with it when he was diagnosed with ALS, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. His decline and eventual death would’ve been bad enough, but the shadow of his time “in country” introduced an ominous element to an already horrific scenario. The family became convinced his disease was brought on by exposure to Agent Orange. And little by little, I started finding out about his experiences in service of his country as he tried to make his peace with it all before the inevitable. Let’s just say they weren’t anything you’d really want to remember. And he didn’t want any of his kin to go through anything like them. He died in the spring of 1988, well before Desert Storm, but I remembered very clearly what he’d told me one summer afternoon as we stood in my driveway with the Cruising Vessel in front of us and the whop-whop-whop of Huey helicopters somewhere off in the distance. Central America was the flashpoint then, and in Louie’s opinion, if Ronnie Ray-Gun tried to pick a fight down there, the best thing I could do would be to develop a love of maple leaves, if you take my meaning. Yes, my veteran uncle, whom I venerated and loved fiercely because he was dying of a cruel, terrifying, utterly random monster of a disease, was advising me to dodge the draft, if and when it ever became an issue.

Flash forward to the fall of 1990. Remember, I was 21 then… prime draft age, if Desert Storm turned out to be more than the president expected and more troops became necessary. Which meant I could very shortly be facing an agonizing decision that would forever alter my life. And the only thing I really wanted to be thinking about just then was how to find myself another girlfriend. Oh, yeah, and my classes. Can’t forget I was still a college student, even if I wasn’t exactly focusing on that at the moment.

So, saying I had a lot on my mind by the time January 17, 1991 rolled around would be a major understatement.

I had an evening class that quarter, a real drag considering I commuted from home instead of living on campus. I remember it was very dark, a cloudy, moonless night, and very cold as I walked across the deserted campus to my daily driver, a little four-door VW Rabbit. (The Galaxie wasn’t fuel-efficient enough for a 50-mile-per-day commute, and also not too practical for the U’s modest-sized parking stalls.) I don’t recall that I was thinking about Iraq, or much of anything really. I just wanted to get home. When I started the engine and flipped on the radio, I heard gunfire, explosions, and the breathless voices of correspondents standing on a rooftop somewhere in Baghdad, reporting live from the other side of the world on the allied assault. It took me a moment to figure out what I was hearing, and then I was utterly captivated, seeing it all in my head like a movie as I drove south along I-215. My route swung to the far east side of the valley at one point, very near the mountains. Back then, that area wasn’t nearly as developed as it is now, so there weren’t many lights over that way, and the night became even darker. It seemed as if my little car were coasting through deep space, with the only sign of life in the entire universe being a thin, static-filled voice that whispered tales of death from across the endless black. The Gulf War would become known for the eerie green night-vision images of the bombardment, and the lo-rez “POV” shots of smart bombs obliterating buildings, but when I think of the opening night, at least, I have a vision of grim isolation and darkness broken only by the dim glow of my dashboard.

The shooting part of the war lasted only a month, of course; it wasn’t Vietnam by a long shot. But the specter of that previous conflict nevertheless permeated the intense handful of weeks it took to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait. I remember it as a time of nationwide hysteria. All those damn yellow ribbons everywhere were just as irrational, in my opinion, as my own paranoia about getting drafted, and it was all directly fueled by the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.” (I thought then and still believe now that all that hyper-patriotism and “support the troops” stuff was really a huge case of overcompensation for the relatively shitty way the ‘Nam vets were treated when they came home. And you know what? Making such a fuss over a new generation of vets didn’t do a damn thing to atone to the ‘Nam guys. But that, perhaps, is another rant.)

As I recall, my theater friends were actually a little disappointed that it ended so soon, and in the way it did, with President G.H.W. Bush stopping the troops at the border instead of going on to conquer Baghdad. At the time, I didn’t have any real opinion on whether that was the best move; I was just glad to have the conflict finished with my worst fears unrealized. Months of accumulated anxiety drained out of me within days, and even though I continued to follow the post-war news for a while — I was fascinated by the efforts of larger-than-life firefighter Red Adair and his people to shut down the oil wells the Iraqis had ignited during their retreat — my thoughts quickly returned to their usual grooves. Work, school, movies, brooding about lost love, trying to find a new love. After all the fuss, the only things that stayed with me from my “wartime experience” were a daily NPR habit, a journal that would undoubtedly embarrass the hell out of me today, and the disillusionment of realizing just how marginalized and despised my opinions are in my own community. I mean, I always knew I was an odd duck because I didn’t go to church and I liked my entertainment R-rated, but I nevertheless thought I basically fit in here. After all, I was born here, my family roots go back to the Mormon pioneers of 1847… of course I could find my place in Utah. But thanks to the Gulf War, I found out in a very short period what it really means to be socially and/or politically liberal in Utah. And while it may sound melodramatic to say it like this, the truth is I haven’t felt entirely welcome or comfortable in my home state since then.

That was just my personal experience, though. Looking at the broader view, and with the benefit of hindsight, was the Gulf War really as big a deal as it seemed in the overheated mind of a 21-year-old movie-theater usher? Damned if I know. If we take the war entirely on its own terms, I would say no, it wasn’t much more than another little exercise in American muscle-flexing, like that business in Grenada back in the ’80s. And yet… no historical event really exists in a vacuum, does it? Our involvement in the Gulf War led directly to the 9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and the upending of our values, i.e., the rise of the security state and institutionalized torture becoming as American as apple pie. If you’ve never thought about it, the logic is pretty obvious: it is the American presence in Saudi Arabia, established during Operation Desert Shield before the Gulf War and maintained afterwards to keep Saddam Hussein bottled up, that provides most of the fuel for al-Qaeda’s grudge against the U.S. If we hadn’t stationed troops there, or if we’d withdrawn them at some point in the mid-90s, perhaps al-Qaeda wouldn’t have built up such a head of steam, and 9/11 and all the subsequent nastiness wouldn’t have happened. (Of course, we also could have reacted more intelligently to 9/11 instead of leaping immediately into not only one but two new wars, both of which turned into exactly the sort of quagmires I once feared, but again, another rant for another time.)

We really didn’t have a choice back in ’91, though, did we? If you’d have asked me at the time if we were justified in going to war in the Middle East, I’d have said no, it’s none of our business what happens on the other side of the world and, oh yeah, no blood for oil! I now understand that this was the simplistic view of a naive young man. I’ve since reconsidered much of what I thought was true back then, and as queasy as it makes me to have to admit this, I now believe we did what we had to do. It wasn’t right for Hussein to invade a sovereign country, and as the big boy on the block, the U.S. was best qualified to do something about it. Not to mention obligated, since we had a big hand in creating Saddam Hussein in the first place. Looking back, I think we did the right thing, and more importantly, we did it the right way, with the full backing and assistance of the international community instead of going it (more or less) alone. And I also have to give Bush Sr. some credit for stopping at the border; he stayed within the parameters of the UN mandate. He followed the rules, and I respect him for that. It’s more than his arrogant dullard son proved capable of doing.

There are those who believe H.W. Bush was weak for obeying the mandate, that it would’ve been better to go on to Baghdad. I disagree. In hindsight, “regime change” isn’t a very easy — or predictable — thing to do. We weren’t prepared to rebuild a nation then, and I’m not confident our allies would’ve wanted to help us with the job. And it wouldn’t have changed anything with regards to al-Qaeda, either, because we’d still have been in Saudi to support the rebuilding operation, and we’d have been occupying Iraq also, so we’d still look to bin Laden like Western imperialists pushing Muslims around. I don’t believe in fate, but it certainly seems we were painted into a corner when it came to the rise of the terrorists.

As for the “no blood for oil” thing, well, I still believe we got involved in the liberation of Kuwait in part because we were worried about the oil supply… but I’m no longer as black-and-white about the ethics of that. We need the stuff, don’t we? A plain and simple, if deeply uncomfortable, truth. Any significant disruption in oil production could lead to a major economic, if not social, breakdown, not only in the U.S. but throughout Western civilization. Which means it is in our best interests to be willing to fight for the stuff. I wish this wasn’t the case, but it is. And I’m now able to see it, and willing to admit it, which I wasn’t when I was 21.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. Despite the softening of my positions on the necessity of the Gulf War, I still wish we’d have been able to find another way. But I now see that the U.S. didn’t have as much freedom in the whole thing as I used to believe… and of course, once the die was cast, everything that’s happened in the 20 years since was more or less inevitable. Referring back to the opinion blog that started this long-ass rumination, Josh Marshall calls the Gulf War a pivotal event, a “detonation point from which numerous shards and projectiles are still ripping forward into history.” That’s an excellent metaphor, but I would add that it wasn’t a war itself so much as the opening battle of the much bigger war we’re still fighting.

If you see it that way, it’s no longer so much fun to talk about. Which is probably why no one has been talking much about it this week…