CNN iReport

Like a lot of men my age I grew up in the shadow of a man who was a product of an era just after the end of World War two. It was a world in wich the nation did what it needed to to reestablish order and in doing so gave birth to many mythalogical constructs we are still struggling to over come today. A lot of boys at the time were growing up with out fathers and as a result they turned to replacement fathers in the form of movie stars. In that world the boys were exposed to endless hours of Televison and Movie violence where the hero for the most part always won and when it looked like there was no hope left someone almost always came to the rescue and the enemy was defeated with a limited amount of actual on screen carnage. The enemy was always idenified by the uniform they wore, the accent they had or the cartoonish way in which they would reveal their evil plans at world domination while the hero was about to be done away with. In that world the solution to a problem was always simple and beyond doubt. There were no grey areas, the good guys were beyond reproach and their motavations were pure of heart.The bad guys were agents of chaos bent on the destruction of civilization and thus they needed to be defeated at all cost. If you needed a bigger gun, more bombs or even more troops you simple asked and there they were ready to defend good at any cost. Years later when these boys joined the military and went off to serve in vietnam with the same dedication and sense of purpose their fathers had had when fighting the NAZIS their childhood perceptions of good and evil and war itself were suddenly confronted with the harsh realities of the true complications of a war with very little similarity to anything they ever imagined. Suddenly they were confronted with a conflict that was being orchestrated by politicians thousands of miles away who were more concered with their own political capital than they were the lives of the troops who spent every moment trying to survive. The end result of the war is still below the surface of every military decision that is made today. The current deabte over the war in Afghanistan is a good example of the struggle we have to get beyond the Vietnam syndrome. On the one hand there are people who want the President to act quickly and send as many troops as he can and in doing so much like an old movie simply defeat the enemy by the shear size of our show of force. Then there are those who believe we should pack up now and leave the country in the shape it's in before we end up in a no-win situation or "Quagmire" and Afghanistan becomes "Obamas Vietnam. Both these approaches I believe suffer from the same remaint of childhood memories and our nations overall view that everything has a simple solution and that good will defeat evil if only because we think it will. Obamas approach seems to have deviated from these approaches in that he is not only taking his time to consider the options he is apparently not weighed down by some of the views of the world that others that have come before him have had. His perspective is not based on idealized versions of the world but rather on the reality of the complexities. Just because he takes his time making a decision and consults with people who know more about an issue than he does or see things from a differnt perspective doesn't mean he is in danger of repeating the same mistakes as his predecessors. Time will tell if his appraoch works, but for the time being making a thoughtful decision is a lot more comforting than a rash and self detructive one. If we have learned anything from Vietnam and the various conflicts that have plagued this planet in the last forty years it's that the only thing that results from thinking that you have all the answers to anything is more questions and a whole lot more violence. The kid in me wishes that John Wayne could save the day but the adult (some would argue that point) in me truly wishes that words had a stronger and longer lasting effect on people than bullets and childhood fantasies of hero worshop do.