Every generation for the last sixty years has had an event occur that they will never forget. It is a bookmark on the hard drive of their memory. The World War II generation, still living, remembers exactly where they were December 7, 1941, when they heard about Pearl Harbor.

For my generation, the boomer generation, the singular event we remember occurred on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I still remember walking back from the library to my sixth grade class, where another classmate came running down the hall screaming, "President Kennedy has been shot."

Then the buster generation had an event seared into their memory on January 20, 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in a ball of fire before a nationwide television audience.

Now the mil…