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I leaned in close, peering at the grainy black and white pictures of the shaven heads, taunt faces and ultra skinny frames of the just freed Holocaust victims. Tears slid silently across my face. You didn’t have to wonder what these survivors thought of the American soldier!
The World War II Museum in New Orleans is not so much a string of exhibits as it is an “experience”.
We arrived with the sun so as not to miss a thing. My friend laid his veteran card on the counter and they near ’bout saluted thanking him for his service and immediately waved his admission fee. I’m telling you, it didn’t cost him one penny to get in! And he didn’t even mention his time in Vietnam: or his Green Beret, his Combat Infantryman Badge, his Paratrooper Wings or the Bronze Star.
When they discovered that I had never served a day in the military, they were still nice but I didn’t exactly get the same treatment.
AND I SHOULDN’T HAVE! So much gets blurred in our hurry up, it’s all about us, let the good times roll society….it’s easy to forget that citizen soldiers like my friend paid their admission price at Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, the Argonne Forest, Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Pork Chop Hill, Khe Sanh, Iraq, Afghanistan...
They charged me the full admission fee.
AND THEY SHOULD HAVE! I ought to be paying something. It’s always been a one way street for me. I have received every blessing America has to offer...without lifting a finger. I never left a wife and baby to take an Uncle Sam mandated trip abroad. I’ve never eaten a K-ration. Slept in a leaky tent in a hostile land. Stormed a fortified beach...
If you are wondering how a museum can be an “experience” let me give you one example. When their extraordinary movie on World War II got down to the Battle of the Bulge, the last ditch counteroffensive by the Germans in the freezing cold of December, 1944—it started snowing inside the theater!
When we walked by the Battle of the Bulge exhibit later in the tour, I swear to you, the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees as we huddled around picture after picture of determined GI’s fighting across the frozen ground. Uncle Clifford was wounded in this battle. He never talked about the shrapnel that ripped through his body. But he did mention that he had on seven shirts when he got hit.