Last night, I was one of thousands who descended on the White House for a surreal and discordantly jubilant celebration - the closest my generation has come to a VE Day or VJ Day. The closest, but not the same. Those earlier celebrations commemorated the cessation of hostilities; Osama bin Laden's demise offers no such thing. It was instead a paean to justice with the feel of a college tailgate -- as if every football team on every campus in America had just brought home the Rose Bowl trophy, as one friend put it. Scores of young people chanted "U-S-A" over and over. Men in their teens and 20s shimmied up trees with American flags to the cheering of crowds below. The same refrain of "Nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye!" hurled at Washington Capitals opponents in recent hockey playoff games a dozen blocks away was repeated here. It seemed incongruous, out of step with the gravity of a war not won, but it wasn't.

      Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It wasn't, as Monday's Financial Times scornfully put it, a "frat party overshadow[ing a] solemn moment." The newspaper heaped opprobrium on the makers of these impromptu celebrations; its prose dripped with disdain as the author contrasted the ages of youthful celebrants with that of the 250-year-old New York City chapel, whose railings, the FT notes disapprovingly, "people climbed on."

Forgive us our trespasses on antiquity, but in his rush to condemnation, this reporter must have missed a thing or two. Did he not take the same inspiration in this cross-section of people coming together? Did he not see the groups of enlisted men and officers locked in celebration? Surely, they've earned some right to feel happy -- even jubilant -- at bin Laden's fall.

Rejoicing in death is a strange and troubling thing, even if few people in modern history have so deserved that fate. The crowds grew more dense as I approached Lafayette Park, where people gathered across from the White House. "We're coming for Qaddafi too!" shouted one exultant attendee part way across 15th Street. "Just wait 'til Tuesday!" On the surface, it isn't easy to reconcile cans of Four Loko with the gravity of war, the finality of death, but where I was, there were, I think, no illusions about those things. This was not VJ Day, but it was a day of victory -- one of the very few we are likely to get.

To the same disdainful FT scribe, our youth was a black mark -- incontrovertible evidence of our own immaturity: "Most of those there had at best dim memories of September 11, 2001, since they were in junior high school at the time and struggled to express exactly why they had come."

I too was in junior high school when the attacks occurred, but the images of heat-twisted steel and billowing smoke and the terrible collapse of those Twin Towers are no less etched in my memory by dint of youth. My adulthood -- the adulthood of many of last night's celebrants -- dawned with that awful strike of terror. It marked a new age of fear. From anthrax mailings to the D.C. sniper, terror seeped into our lives. Meanwhile, those who fought in the armed forces sacrificed far more than peace of mind, and too many have given what Abraham Lincoln once so memorably described as their "last full measure of devotion."

Unlike in ages past, we did not celebrate an end to conflict last night. War no longer fits in the tidy bookends of declarations and treaties. The truth is that there will be no VJ Day for the war on terror. Victory, if it comes, will be painfully slow. Ahead lies the prospect of new heads springing from the hydra in this battle between those who seek to sow fear and those desperate to extinguish incipient terrors. But for one night, last night, there was jubilation. The butcher of September 11 -- that slayer of thousands -- was no more. And that, I can drink to. 

For more analysis from Clifford Marks, follow him on Twitter: @cliffmarks.

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