Frederick J. Kroesen entered the Army as a private but had risen to second lieutenant and platoon leader by the time his infantry unit, out of Camp Van Dorn, Miss., entered the small crossroads town of Jebsheim in France as World War II was drawing to a close.

It was January 1945 and for the Allied troops advancing on the French-German border, this was supposed to be a relatively easy part of the campaign to clear out the last German occupiers.

"We thought it was just kind of a mopping-up exercise, that we would move on through the town and have no problems because the other company had really seemed to destroy the defenses of the Germans," Kroesen recalled.

Instead, the Germans mounted a heavy defense and called in reinforcements. The Americans met them head-on.

When the fierce fighting was over, the Americans had 3,000 German prisoners and their actions earned a Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation - but at a cost. Out of six officers in Kroesen's company, four were wounded seriously enough to require evacuation.

He took over as company commander, though wounded in the face by shell fragments himself.

Kroesen, now 76, and living in Alexandria, Va., is proud of that moment, but he puts it in the perspective of the century's other wars in which he served, earning 30 decorations.

"I think there are two wars that are equally significant," he says. "One was World War II. It truly was a world war and truly a conquest by the democratic societies, the free world against totalitarianism."

The old soldier, who served in Korea, became a two-star general in Vietnam and wore four stars when he retired in 1983, continues:

"The second war that was just as important was the Cold War, which we fought for 40 years and finally won when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Usually when I talk about my involvement in wars, I say I was in four of them because the Cold War was my fourth war. I was stationed around the world."

One lifetime, four major conflicts. In the 20th century, war on an unprecedented scale reset history's course again and again, reshaped the world order and altered tens of millions of lives.

There have been smaller-scale wars, too, of course, including some with far-reaching consequences - like the conflicts still smoldering in the Balkans that in 1914 became the spark for a worldwide conflagration.

World War I broke up two empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian, says Bruce Schulman, an associate professor of history at Boston University.

"Probably the most important consequence of World War I is the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the rise of Communism as a global force," he says.

Another consequence was that the war pushed the United States toward a larger global role, though the nation still refused to become the international economic leader and followed protectionist policies when World War I ended, Schulman says. That would change forever with the Second World War.

For Americans, that war, plus Vietnam and Korea, also "transformed the relationship" between government and people, he says.

World War II, says Schulman, "really accomplished what the Depression and New Deal had started, which was the idea that national government was going to be the guarantor of security, both physical and economic, for all Americans."

"The postwar era," he says, "was the era ... in which we relied on government to build our highways and airports, to develop laggard regions like the South and Southwest, to build schools and staff them, to support science, the universities, the GI Bill.

"If you look at almost anything that happened, you can see the hand of the federal government in that. And I think that is a direct result of the experience of World War II."

Kroesen, born just five years after the armistice that ended World War I, has a more personal view of these wars.

"The whole country seemed to go to war in World War II," Kroesen recalls.

"At home, before I left, there was an understanding that all the soldiers in the Army who were still in the United States were training and getting ready to go to war. We were all encouraged by the civilian population that what we were doing was right, proper and appreciated."

There were drives for aluminum, there was gasoline rationing, women worked on the assembly lines in war industries - all to support the war effort.

"This didn't happen in Korea or Vietnam," he says, recalling divisions within government and society over whether the nation should be fighting in those wars.

Kroesen was 30 years old and a major when he entered the Korean War as it was nearing an end in 1953.

"We were engaged in the stalemate actions only," he says. "We were holding positions and sending out patrols, and fighting off Chinese patrols that might come into our area."

He suffered a wound, which he described as slight, from an artillery shell burst. But the soldiers' sacrifices in Korea seemed to go unnoticed.

"When I came home," he recalls, "it was as though the American population had no idea where I'd been or why I'd been there. Or cared."

Korea was called the "Forgotten War," even though the United States suffered more than 33,000 battlefield deaths.

The Vietnam War was even more divisive, and cost nearly 50,000 American lives in combat. It brought down the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 and triggered widespread antiwar demonstrations on college campuses and elsewhere.

Its unpopularity forced the United States into peace negotiations, a phased withdrawal of its forces, and finally a peace agreement in 1973. With American combat forces gone, South Vietnam fell to the Communist North two years later.

U.S. involvement ended in embarrassment and humiliation with the chaotic rooftop evacuation of the American embassy, an image that will live on in history.

Retired Col. Harry. G. Summers, a military analyst and historian, says U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Korea led to the demise of the Soviet Union.

"The Korean War said to the Communists you can't expand by open force of arms because we're going to block you on that," says Summers, who served in both Korea and Vietnam. "And the Vietnam War said you can't expand by covert force of arms because we're going to block you on that, too."

But historian Schulman believes Vietnam may have had the opposite effect by harming the United States' standing in the world and emboldening the Soviets, who supported North Vietnam.

For Kroesen, memories of Vietnam remain vivid, and sometimes bitter.

Returning home, he met a hostile public reaction: "Soldiers being told to take their uniforms off when they traveled across country because of the kind of treatment they would get from the people traveling on trains, or in air terminals."

Kroesen served two tours of duty in Vietnam and in 1971 was named commander of the ill-fated American Division.

Three years earlier, troops of the division had killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and only months before he took command, American soldiers suffered heavy casualties when the North Vietnamese overran their firebase.

That battle came at a time when antiwar protests were intensifying over rising American battlefield deaths and even U.S. troops were questioning why they were there. The Army was in disarray, beset by racial, drug and leadership problems. No one wanted to be the last American to die in Vietnam.

Looking back, Kroesen blames the news media for portraying as hopeless what he calls a winning strategy by 1972, and he faults the government for abandoning America's South Vietnamese allies.

"I will go to my grave ashamed of what we did in Vietnam," he said, "because we ran out on a people who were counting on us to support and sustain them while they evolved into a democratic society."

Kroesen, who went on to Cold War postings as commander of the U.S. Army, Europe, and the Central Army Group (NATO), said America's last major conflict of the century - the 1991 Gulf War - marked a turning point.

U.S. forces, with the majority of the public supporting that war, crushed Iraq into surrender in only 96 hours.

Almost five decades after World War II, where nearly 300,000 U.S. combatants died, the Gulf War force of nearly half a million U.S. troops, backed by high-tech aircraft and other weapons, suffered just 148 battlefield deaths.

"The Gulf War will be an example of how to do it for the next 500 years," says Kroesen. "It was the culmination of ... the Army's retrenchment from Korea, from Vietnam War days, in which we showed how a properly supported Army - one that is equipped properly - can do its job in the field when called upon."

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