So how to explain it to our children?
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One significant difference that will be easy for young people to understand is that there was a draft, and huge numbers of casualties. As soon as the draft was ended [during the Nixon admin, btw], the college campus protests ended. So their protests.
Another difference is that then the Free World [aka us] was in a life or death struggle against the advances of the Soviet Empire. There is not a major military power trying to take over the world today.
I disagree. We are in a life or death struggle and perhaps one more dangerous to us than our fight against the Soviets.
At bottom the Soviets were rational, if evil, men. They understood that we would wipe them off the map if they tried anything directly against us. Therefore the overt military might of both sides was negated. Their leaders eventually became seduced by the comparative lifestyle of our society. They lived in their German built Dachas with their western appliances and were driven to work in (inferior) knock offs of western automobiles. And they visited the west and saw how we lived. And they couldn't provide anything remotely similar for their people. And the people knew it.
Today we face a foe led by "true believers" who are viewing the world through an 8th century mindset. They believe they have a religious duty to their god to either convert us or kill us and they've been fighting that battle, in their minds, continuously for 1300 years. Now they have access to wealth comparable to the west and weapons to make them equal to us in their power to threaten. We used to talk about the threat of "the Islamic bomb," singular. We now have to accept that there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of WMD in the hands or within reach of the jihadists. And they don't believe in "peaceful coexistence" except as a tactic to buy time until they can slit our throats.
We are not dealing with rational human beings this time. We are, frankly, in more danger, not less. I think several nuclear and bio/chem exchanges with the jihadists are inevitable now. They will only happen faster if we cut and run in Iraq. If we stay the course we have a chance to change the paradigm in the middle east and undermine the mad mullah's, but only if we stay. Even then they will certainly try to use any weapons they can get their hands on against us. If we succeed in Iraq I predict that they will concentrate on Pakistan, since it already has nukes, and work to overthrow or coerce Musharraf into supporting them.
What do we do if Iran declares the Straights of Hormuz closed to western oil tankers and threatens to enforce that with nukes? How do we respond? What if they somehow sneak a nuke into the midst of one of our carrier battle groups? We know that they have subs. How hard would it be to lay one on the bottom with a nuke aboard and wait for a battle group to wander by? With an average depth of 50 meters across the Persian Gulf and a maximum of 90 a "suicide sub" would be in a position to take out the carrier and a good bit of their escorts, depending on how close they passed. And the Straits of Hormuz offer few channels for a battle group to pass through that couldn't be covered easily this way.
And they openly send their shock troops among us labeled as "imams" and traveling on legitimate visas as clergy. And we let them in to sell their hate to the vulnerable and ignorant. And they kill us here, as well.
I repeat, we are in more danger now than then.