THE BELL CURVE:

It isn’t easy being a member of the Greatest Generation. We live with constant pressure to shape up to this title. If you think selfless dedication to God and country is an easy mantle to wear night and day, try it some time.

Winning the only American war since our revolution to be fought largely by volunteers is no longer enough. We have to answer daily to Tom Brokaw.

As a World War II survivor, I was invited to offer some thoughts for the Veterans Day edition of the Pilot and, true to form, I came in too late. But I read the letters and the Forum page and some thoughts occurred to me that I’d like to add — starting with Tom Brokaw, who anointed us in his book.

What he didn’t make clear was the part that circumstances beyond our control played in our canonization.

We just happened to be born into the midst of the worst economic depression in our history, followed by a war of shattering breadth and depth that threatened virtually everything we held dear.

We responded nobly. When I went home from college for Christmas in 1941, I had to wait in long lines to enlist in the Navy. Thousands of college kids didn’t go back to school in January of ’42. There were a multitude of reasons for this tidal wave of enlistments besides feeling needed by our country.

First and foremost were the flowing juices for the kind of adventure we had once fantasized with toy guns and the history of heroic ancestors.

Then there was the desire to pick our own duty rather than await the inevitability and random placement of the military draft. And there was just being part of something spectacularly big, rather than standing outside while our friends signed on. Yes, and the sense, also, that we would be better seen by girls if we were in uniform

We were mostly soft-bellied visionary innocents in the first giddy weeks of thinking we would be taking a semester from college to teach these barbarians who blindsided us that they couldn’t mess with the U.S. without suffering quick and devastating retribution.

Then we would go back and finish our education. That’s what happened to those of us who were lucky — with one significant difference. We didn’t miss a semester. We missed four years.

A few years ago when I went to see “Saving Private Ryan,” we were asked before the film began to stand and be applauded if we had served in World War II. In spite of my wife tugging at my sleeve, I didn’t stand.

I’m not sure I know why, because I have great pride in that part of my life. But I think two reservations were chewing at me. First, I had it soft contrasted with the men who fought their way ashore at Normandy to seek Private Ryan, and I didn’t feel comfortable elbowing into their company. And second, there was the issue I had with Brokaw’s book that ignored the part played by random timing in placing us in World War II.

It was my conviction then — and still is — that if any of the generations that followed mine had to face a similar set of circumstances, they would have responded much as we did. By way of evidence, I would hold up the college kids who risked their lives to break down barriers to civil rights in this country that much of the Greatest Generation had lived with either comfortably or in ignorance (including me). Or the young Americans who were sent to Vietnam to get caught in the crossfire of a civil war they didn’t understand and wasn’t supported at home. They went because their government sent them, and they did their job with courage and forbearance.

I have no reason to doubt they would have responded to my war in much the same way — as would other generations without marquee events to point to.

We tend to rise to the challenges that face us in direct proportion to their urgency. We did, and other generations would, too.

Two recent events set me to thinking about these matters as Veterans Day approached. For a dozen years — probably more — I did lunch once a month with three pilots I’d served with, two Navy and one Marine.

We were all over the place politically, philosophically and temperamentally, but the bonding was firm and permanent.

We lost P.O. Harwell (always simply Po), a Navy Commander and test pilot who was the mover and shaker of our little group, to a heart attack some seven years ago.

When Marine fighter pilot John Ferguson lost a long fight to cancer two years ago, the lunches stopped.

The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak, then wonderfully I got a call from the fourth member, Joe Blizzard. He said, “Let’s have lunch,” and we did and we will again.

The other event was a reprise of the Private Ryan episode, when the highlight of a visit to North Carolina was an old-fashioned band concert.

The concluding number was a medley of the songs associated with each branch of our military service, accompanied by an invitation to World War II vets to stand when the appropriate song came on.

And when the band swung into “Anchors Aweigh,” I stood, along with a lot of other old geezers, bonding briefly once again.

So happy late Veterans Day.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.