“War is so much different today. Communication is different. Medical help is different. Even coming back is different. Today you get on a plane, come home from being in hell and two days later, you’re shopping at the mall.”

— McLean County Circuit Court Judge Robert Freitag, and a veteran of Iraq.

In the antiquated World War II film clips and old war movies, the soldiers always dug into trenches, fired their rifles, talked to each other via walkie-talkie and endlessly pulled out grenade pins with their teeth.

Dental health was different back then and flossing with rusty metal rings more accepted.

War?

It was hell, unadulterated hell, as it still is. But everything else?

You, too, have noticed, I’m sure.

War is just plain different now, especially when mirrored against the standards of the past.

You don’t see conventional battleground scenes on the nightly news anymore.

Even Vietnam, a coming-of-age guerilla war, had guys trawling through the trenches.

Television doesn’t do war shows anymore either (remember “Combat” or “Rat Patrol” out of the 1960s?) because it obviously can’t find a way to make this kind of war very entertaining.

Boys don’t play with “army” men anymore because the enemy is no longer able to be defined.

There is no Gee I Think That Is A Terrorist Joe doll.

Just where is Afghanistan on a world map?

What’s next to it?

Even if it’s now an eight-year war — the longest in recent history — how many people can instantly point to it on a globe?

This thought comes to mind today as we ready for another Veterans Day and salute our warriors once again.

“War is still war,” says Freitag, who served 10 months in Iraq as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve before coming back home three years ago, “but the lines of it are so blurred now. In the classic days of war, everyone wore a uniform and you knew the enemy by that. Now the bad guys are so difficult to identify — you never truly know just who is the enemy — and the `warfare’ can be anywhere. The exhausting part of my experience was that you have to be on guard all the time. You never knew where the next danger was coming from.”

Brett Scott, a sergeant first class from Bloomington and recruiter for today’s troops, concurs:

“Fighting the insurgents makes it crazy. It is so crazy, because of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has readjusted the way they train for war. It’s a lot more shooting and clearing buildings and clearing out blocks. It’s dealing with the way of war today.”

Not long ago, at a welcome-home celebration in Bloomington for a group of troops coming back from Afghanistan, a World War II veteran who said he was there only to say `thanks’ then also added, “These new guys at war, I feel sorry for them. They don’t get the credit we did because war is so different now. No one fully understands it. And in a lot of ways, it is so much more brutal.”

Yes, they aren’t making movies and doing TV drama about how odd the warfare of the 21st century has become.

But that doesn’t make today’s veterans any less heroes for what they are facing.

Happy Veterans Day.

Contact Bill Flick at flick@pantagraph.com.