My hunch is that for many of us, our fascination with World War II stems from a deep, hidden yearning for community. We respect the bravery of soldiers who served and bled for their country, but the new Ken Burns documentary, following the Tom Brokaw books, grabs our attention because we envy a time when America had common purpose.

We obviously aren’t united about Iraq. For that matter, except for a few weeks after Sept. 11, we haven’t been a very unified nation since before Vietnam.

World War II was different. One of the more interesting parts of Burns’ PBS series is his look at four communities back home while battles raged in Europe and the Pacific. He interviews people about how the war played out in towns such as Sacramento and how the conflict affected them.

He’s essentially saying that greatest generation wasn’t made up only of soldiers in the field. It was the folks back home, too. Everyone was wrapped up in the cause, right down to girls following their boyfriends’ deployments on maps of Europe and women joining the work force for the first time.

Burns summed up the difference between then and now when he recently told USA Today that we lack “the shared sacrifices World War II demanded that created community and made us spiritually richer.”

Today, “we aren’t asked to give up anything. We’re narcissistic free agents,” he said. “Surfing the Internet alone. Watching TV alone. Driving alone. There’s too much Pluribus and not enough Unum.”

It wasn’t until I considered this element of community – and who makes up the greatest generation – that I was able to put my finger on what I so admire about my mother and the ladies she has banded with for more than five decades. The more I think about them holding together as friends since they were young girls, sharing everything from Pearl Harbor to firstborns to shattering deaths, the more I realize they are a microcosm of the community for which many of us yearn.

These women still meet for cards each Tuesday, but the Poker Club, as it is called, is about much more than the aces, jacks and deuces they put on the table.

They probably wouldn’t think of themselves this way, but together they are the antithesis of today’s go-it-alone ethos. They have been meeting each week since before Eisenhower was president, before many women worked and long before anyone dreamed of the term “greatest generation.”

Like many other wives and mothers of their era, they often made their mark silently. They enjoyed common rites of passage while bearing up through adversity for the good of their families.

The Poker Club members married after World War II, had children, joined the PTA, attended Little League games, drove in carpools, hosted birthday parties, celebrated graduations and watched their children marry and start families of their own.

They also ran into their share of struggles. Together, they endured the dissolution of marriages, their children’s ups and downs and the loss of friends. At any given moment, life wasn’t working for one or more of them.

So they counseled each other, bore up through disease and addictions and survived tears at hospitals.

In other words, they persevered. And they made it through glorious and shattering personal and world events because they stuck together.

We celebrate the men who won World War II, who fought in the trenches and came home to start their careers after liberating a continent and triumphing in the Pacific.

But women like these, whom you can find in every community and whom Burns brought to light in his documentary, are just as important in helping us understand – and perhaps recapture – the sense of community their generation experienced. They may not have won a war, not literally, but they were part of the rebirth of our nation after a long and deadly conflict.

As hard as it is to imagine now, we will find our way past Iraq someday. Maybe then we can recapture that sense of community. If we do, we probably will have an even more direct connection with World War II and the greatest generation.

And may we then recall as fondly the women in our own communities who pushed their families forward, held each other together and looked ahead, not back.