I was born during a war, though you wouldn’t have known it. There was clean water and electricity and nutrition enough to see an eight-pound baby girl into the world on a cold December night in Texas. It was the Gulf War . The devastation was somewhere over there, not here. Two more wars began before I went into middle school; one ended — formally, anyway — after I had gone to college, the other continues to this day. While I was in college, we took military action in Libya, too. Again, there was no rupture on the home front,...