There was no way we could ever measure up to the “Greatest Generation,” as they have been labeled by Tom Brokaw.

My uncles were genuine heroes.

Uncle Carl made his first parachute jump at D-Day. In one of the many mistakes made that day, his unit was dropped miles from the target zone and he was captured by the Germans. Since his name was Carl Baer, of German heritage, he was subjected to heavier beatings and torture than the others until his prison camp was liberated. When he came home, he was still wearing the bandages from his wounds.

When I worked in his Cambridge bakery, his tough co-workers used to call him “One-jump Baer.” He would load his ovens and listen to the friendly abuse for a while. Then he would reply, “That’s one more than any of you bastards ever made.”

End of discussion.

Uncle “Buddy” or Jerry Twomey was with Merrill’s Marauders. His unit was in the longest continual contact with the enemy in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces. When he died last year, the Nevada newspaper obituary said he came home with a Purple Heart, three battle stars and the Combat Infantry Badge.

The newspaper obituary was the first any of us heard of the medals. The uncles and their friends just stuck their medals in their bureau drawers when they got home. The medals meant little to them because everyone they knew had the same things in their bureau drawers. They would give us their medals to play with and we used to pin them on our hats.

None of them would ever talk about it, even when we pleaded with them to tell us of D-Day, South Pacific island fighting or killing “Japs” or “Krauts.”

Now, one by one, they are falling.

I suspect this is the basis of the hypnotic appeal the History Channel has for males my age. The History Channel provides 24-hour coverage of World War II.

In my house, it is the first channel checked in the morning and the last one at night. If another television show is just a little too boring, we always check in to “see what Hitler is doing.” Not once has any male said, “Change the channel.” We can watch the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Bulge, or anything on Iwo Jima, every day.

If they chose to show 24 hours of coverage of D-Day on June 6, I would watch.

I cannot imagine my generation matching those deeds.

On a recent canoe trip we thought about what it must have been like going ashore in those Higgins boats on D-Day with people dying all around. My philosopher friend Phil has guessed that our attitude would be far from heroic. If he ran the boat landing on the Normandy beach, he would have said, “Don’t open that door. Wait a minute. They are still firing. Emmet, jump out the back and see what is going on.”

I like my friends. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be my friends. But I find it hard to see them charging across Omaha Beach into the face of machine-gun fire. I see them cowering in the water, waiting for reinforcements, maybe swimming back to the boats.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe after Pearl Harbor, if we were young men, we would have signed up and gone off to war, too. Maybe we would have climbed into those boats and stormed ashore, too.

I just can’t see it. And I just can’t see measuring up to that generation.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.