Hiraeth (noun). A feeling of longing for a home that never was. A deep or irrational bond felt with a time or era.

Yesterday was the 77th anniversary of Operation Overlord, better known to Americans as D-Day. Coming as it does in a time of national upheaval, many look back upon this critical historical moment with a curious form of nostalgia.

They are not, of course, nostalgic for the carnage of Omaha Beach, or for the terrible fighting that followed for the next two months in the hedgerow country beyond before the breakout finally took place -- fighting that killed and wounded roughly as many men as America lost during the entire Korean War. They are nostalgic for the feeling of national unity that D-Day represented, or seemed to represent. The invasion of Normandy was a remarkable, even a staggering, military feat, one of the most logistically complex operations in the history of warfare, and as such it was an expression of the national will. Very few people in America wanted the war, but once engaged the country transformed itself into a gigantic machine whose sole purpose was victory. This is not hyperbole. WW2 was one of the very few moments in American history where focus on a single objective was achieved and, despite massive obstacles and heavy losses, maintained until the objective was taken. And I think we, as a people, miss that feeling. What we forget is that the price of near-complete unity and total focus is often strife and strain, trial and tribulation. Humans are gregarious animals by nature, but they are also quarrelsome and fractious. Our tribal groupings fight with each other, and given the absence of an external enemy, our tribes fight with themselves. And one of the peculiar features of the modern world is the capacity that social media, mobile devices and the Internet generally, to further stimulate division. As more and more identity groups form, as more and more hyphens are fixed to the word "American," so too are the reasons for people to argue. The Internet was supposed to unite us, yet the most common word associated with it is "toxic." And nobody, or very nearly nobody, really enjoys a toxic environment. Even the most loathsome internet troll is at heart not much more than a baby crying for attention. When we give up social media, the psychological boost we experience is simply the feeling that we have removed ourselves from a house divided. In our actual, non-virtual lives, all the anger and self-righteousness and reaction-baiting we experience online barely exists. People may not actively like each other, but they are fairly tolerant and civil to one another, even in traffic. Yet we know, deep-down, that to go all the way, and experience true tribal unity, requires an external threat. Something to remind us that all the hyphens, all the labels, all the ways subtle and gross humans sub-divide themselves, are really figments of our imagination. They are invisible barriers which we place voluntarily around ourselves, because there is little obvious penalty for maintaining them.

So yes, we do look back at that terrible time in history with a strange fondness, just as those of us who can remember it look back with a curious warmth on the months following 9/11, when political, racial, ethnic and economic division were forgotten in a sudden and starting display of national unity. The irony that this unity was caused by tragedy fades in and out of our consciousness. Humans tend to see the past with a rosy and nostalgic glow, but the truth is always harsher and more complicated than we remember.

In recent years, as America has become more divided and angry, or perhaps merely convinced itself that it is divided and angry -- perception is reality on the internet -- we have begun a simultaneous process of deifying those who fought in the Second World War. This is never more apparent than on the anniversaries of major battles from that war. The sobriquet we give the men and women who carried through with that conflict to its successful conclusion reflects our adulation of them: The Greatest Generation. It's not a bad handle, but like all broad brushes, it doesn't quite tell the whole truth.

The Second World War put sixteen million Americans in unform, out of a total population of 145 million. (This was the maximum force our military could actually field without causing economic collapse at home.) Of those 16 million, supposedly less than one million actually saw combat and survived, which makes some sense when you consider that a military as large, well-supplied and thoroughly mechanized as America's required a massive system of supply, maintenance, transport, logistics, etc., etc. simply to stay in the field. Infantrymen used to sneer, "One man in the line, and five to bring up the Coca-Cola." This was an exaggeration, but not by all that much. For every infantry division of 15,000 men, there were around 35,000 support troops in the immediate rear, and this figure does not touch the huge number of men and women serving in uniform who never left the United States, or who were deployed overseas in non-combat capacities. Notwithstanding that military service is arduous and hazardous by its very nature, and that accidents do kill a startling number of servicepeople even today, the vast majority of those who served in the war were not placed directly in harm's way during their term of service. Ronald Reagan, to quote one of millions of examples, spent his time in the Army making training films, because his poor eyesight disqualified him from any other type of duty.

Of those who did see battle, the figures were grim: 405,399 were killed in action between 1941 and 1945, and 671,278 combat-wounded. Another 130,201 were taken prisoner, of whom about 14,000 seem to have died in captivity. The various branches of the military also recorded 50,000 deserters, some of whom had been highly decorated before they "voted with their feet" and left the carnage behind.

I do not bring these figures up to disparage those who did not experience battle (please repeat that in your head as you read this), or to pass judgment on those who elected to walk away from it, but rather to show that even during this time of unprecedented unity, the heaviest burdens fell on a relatively small group of people...and if the truth is to be told, not everyone reacted as well to those burdens as Hollywood would have us believe. And the fact of the matter is, there is nothing new in this.

When I was growing up, my history teachers used the "thirds" example to explain the American Revolution. That is to say: one third of colonials supported the revolution, one third remained loyal to the British crown, and one third were indifferent: they simply didn't care. If those fractions are accurate, then we owe our national existence to whatever fraction of that patriotic third actually took up arms and fought, or spied on the British, or supplied the Continental armies with food, ammunition, medicine and moral support. I don't know what this figure is, but doubtless it is a hell of a lot smaller than 33%. Again, the burden was borne by a hardy few.

Likewise, in the Civil War, neither the North nor the South ever came close to putting into the field the total number of men who were fit for arms. The reasons for this were complicated, but one of the largest was simply that many men, regardless of where their sympathies lay, did not wish to fight, and chose not to. As with the Revolution, the actual number of those in the arena was equaled or exceeded by those who elected to remain in the bleachers.

The point I am driving at here is that while we, in this unsettled and divisive period, are looking more and more to the past to comfort ourselves and provide a positive example, the truth is that "national unity" is a relative term. Even among the Greatest Generation, there were half a million draft dodgers, a fact conveniently forgotten whenever the subject of draft evasion during the Vietnam war comes up. The stark fact is that while causes and wars come and go, passions ignite and then cool, nations grapple and then shake hands, human nature remains more or less unchanged. We will always wish that disasters do not befall us, and we will always take pride in the unity these disasters bring about in our otherwise fractious race. What's more, we will always overestimate the level of unity we possessed and conveniently ignore, or forget, how few people bore any share of the burden, much less its heaviest weight. The nostalgia we feel for America as a closed fist is understandable and it is partially rooted in reality, but it is perhaps very nearly equally a fantasy of our own deliberate manufacture.