The morning after Pearl Harbor, surrounded by men he grew up with, standing in a draft board, my grandfather volunteered for the army. Growing up I spent hours listening to stories about World War II.

But, like most of my friends, I hardly ever told stories about the hard times Americans struggled through to stop Hitler to my children. Or stories about the sacrifices Americans made during the Cold War to defeat the Soviet Union.

That history is a fading memory – and my generation bears the blame.

But the price won’t fall on us – it falls on our children. They don’t see the old, safer world they grew up in after the Berlin Wall fell fading away. Or the new enemies rolling toward them.

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Telling stories, in his memoir Carter Wrenn follows The Trail of the Serpent twisting and turning through politics from Reagan to Trump. Order his book from Amazon.