On Valentine’s Day, six University of Notre Dame students piled into a minivan and drove east through the night toward New York City to join the protests against the war in Iraq. I was one of them. We drove fast for fourteen hours, taking turns behind the wheel and navigating, ignoring the irony of driving in a gas-powered vehicle so we could protest what our buttons called a war for oil.

We prayed together as we began the journey. We prayed for our peace and our safety, and for the peace and safety of people we would never know. Then we drove and drove, barreling along the freeway. We sang along with Dave Mathews in four-four time-"A million reasons life to deny let’s toss them away"-ate junk food and argued about politics; told our life stories; talked about faith, doubt; pulled over for bathroom breaks; tried to sleep; tried to stay awake; tried to see the road, read aloud, got lost, got found, and finally pulled into the city.

We must have been quite a sight: a silver minivan full of college kids from the Midwest in a sea of yellow cabs, pulling over to ask a man for directions to Times Square. We finally parked the van in a garage and many dollars later joined the shivering multitudes. With our signs and slogans we followed the crowds streaming across town to the United Nations building. We were all worried about a future we feared we could not change, but knew we had no right to do nothing. People were going to die.

I have heard my generation called many names, none too flattering. In middle school they started calling us Generation Y, I guess because it followed X in the alphabet. The experts anticipated we’d be spoiled techno-savvy spenders. I remember liking how Generation Y sounded like Generation Why, as in "Why bother?" We’ve been called Generation Y2K, and even Generation O, which stands for obese.

In high school, we used to skip class to sit around talking about how we should have been born in the 1960s. But the experts were right: we lacked substance. "We’ve never seen a war. Our generation hasn’t had any major struggles except drugs and divorce. We suck," my fourteen-year-old friends and I used to say. In our own way, even then, we worried about our souls. How would they fare in this too-easy world?

Now we have the war we almost wished for. Before September 11, 2001, we knew something of violence: a gun at a party, a fight at school, a drunken neighbor yelling at his wife. When we were in grade school there was even a war in the Middle East; it played on TV like the little lights flashing in a video game. Still, we had not known violence like this, so close to home. Now we would have to respond to the challenge somehow, just as the generations before us did. Some days we wanted to move to the mountains with sweet boyfriends in tow and just hide out.

The military recruiters called my house almost every week of my senior year in high school. They came to my school and parked shiny Hummers equipped with fancy sound systems on the lawn. We could ride in the armored cars, sometimes even drive them, and drink free Pepsi products while talking to real Marines about our future. Many good, mostly poor, boys signed up. The Marines took two boys at the end of first semester. Encouraged to sign up with a "buddy," they went to boot camp and then to Afghanistan. They were scared, so they registered for a Bible study before they left-just in case something happened. They left and we stayed. That was then.

Now I know a Notre Dame student in the reserves. He’s been activated. He is awaiting orders, possibly to leave school. And I know a Notre Dame Air Force ROTC student who is also in Pax Christi. We ask ourselves every day where we stand and then try to live there. Before my unremarkable generation are the same questions of right and wrong that have faced every generation. Would you kill another human being? Under what circumstances? Would you die for someone?

We set out for New York each for our own reasons. We set out to answer the question of evil, to respond to it, to educate ourselves, to look seriously at what might be done in our names. None of us had all the answers. One student quoted Dorothy Day, "No one has the right to sit down and feel helpless. There is too much work to do." Others talked about just-war theory. I thought about the Holocaust stories my mother used to read to me when I was growing up. I remembered how I’d lie awake at night and wonder what I would have done if I had lived then. Would I have hidden Jews in my house? Would I have died for them? Would I have killed for them? I couldn’t be sure, and I was afraid.