By any measure his life had already been a full one, though not exactly the one he had originally set out to live. Like all baby boomers, George Oliver Thomas found the society that he lived in bore no resemblance the one that had raised him. Little of his childhood world seemed to have survived the years. Even in Idaho he had watched the world of his father slowly peeled away like an onion, layer by layer, until nothing of substance seemed to be left. Whether it was the nightly images of napalm consuming the lush green landscape of Southeast Asia or the faces of angry black youths rampaging through their own neighborhoods, the visions that flashed before GO’s young eyes when he was still a teen had left deep impressions on him that guided his every step. Those remote yet very frightening views of his world, together with the specter of his peers holding their own academic institutions hostage while revolutionaries like Che Guevara worked to bring third world countries into communism’s loving fold, left little room for complacency.

That his generation would be called upon to fulfill some greater purpose as his father’s had been was expected and anticipated. But unlike the men who had marched off in the forties to fight foreign dictators who were inherently evil, GO Thomas and his peers faced issues that were not as black and white. Theirs was a complex world, a world that seemed to be spinning out of control. They inherited a society that possessed no strong leader or great cause powerful enough to pull them together. Instead, each was left to thrash about in search of a cause that he or she could believe in. Everyone of GO Thomas’s generation had to pick which path they would travel in an environment of racial, political, and social upheaval. They had begun their adult lives at a time when they could only comprehend black and white. Even now, as GO tucked his chin down and broke into a slow trot, he saw that there had been no easy choice, no way of knowing what was truly right. In the end, they had all followed the path on which their feet had already been well planted. In the end, they carried on, as best they could, the American traditions that fitted their particular personality and circumstances.

For GO it was college, the Air Force, and, ultimately, his father’s business in Idaho. He didn’t have to go to Vietnam as every one of his flight instructors and squadron commanders had. He escaped the trauma of having the stench of burnt human flesh branded in his memory until the First Gulf War.