From "D-Day, in History and in Memory", by Samuel Hynes in the New York Times:

[...]

The old men on the Mall today were lucky in their war. They went believing that it was a just and necessary war, and when they'd won they came home still believing. Being the winners in a just war gave those veterans a quality that was and is still perceptible in them, though it's hard to define: a confidence, a sense of personal worth, a certainty about their actions in that crucial time when they were young. One worthy thing done at that age when manhood begins can make the rest of a man's life richer, give it a sustaining value.

American wars since the Second World War have been different: lost, or not won or even finished, or trivial, and morally ambiguous at best, though brave men fought in them. The Second World War was our last just and victorious war, the last war a man could come home from with any expectation of glory.

The old men must be thinking about that as they gather together, must be glad that their time of testing came when it did, in a war where the Americans were the good guys beyond question, and the bad guys were absolutely evil. Perhaps that new memorial down on the Mall is our national monument to that last time of national goodness, before we lost our way.

I try to imagine a day 60 years from now, when the veterans of our present conflict — old men themselves by then — gather at their brand-new war memorial, somewhere down on the Mall, to commemorate their own D-Day (that would be March 20, 2063). What will that new generation of old soldiers have in their minds that day? Not the certainty and confidence that today's old men have. Nor the sense of having served in a democratic war that every young man fought in and all the folks at home supported. They'll remember their buddies, and the good times and the bad ones, and wish, perhaps, that their sad war had been worthy of them.