Saturday, I visited the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans.  While not exactly a pleasure, it was time-well-spent!  There was the usual array of weapons from pistols to tanks, of course.  There were also old airplanes, both fighters and bombers.  As the famous Higgins boats or “landing boats” that were used to deposit men on the beaches of Normandy were built in New Orleans, there was quite a bit of interesting information on that as well.

My strongest visual takeaway is an actual glider that crashed into one of the numerous hedgerows across northern France.  It was smaller than I expected and extremely flimsy – little more than canvas over plywood and no engine.  It is no wonder they were called “flying coffins.”

My strongest intellectual takeaway is that Operation Overlord or the Normandy invasion had no contingency plan.  When I attended Infantry Officer Candidate School, we were trained to ALWAYS have a Plan B for every Plan A.  The biggest military operation in history had no backup plan!  Doesn’t that imply Hitler would have won World War Two if the Normandy invasion had failed?  It is hard not to wonder how the world would be different.

My strongest perception inside the buildings of the Museum was the age breakdown of the visitors.  Certainly, the percentage of visitors in their 80’s and 90 was far greater than their percentage of the general population.  This is not surprising since they can actually remember that war.  Also, the percentage of visitors in their 20’s and 30’s was far greater than their percentage of the general population.  They probably brought their children, as they should, to learn about their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

However, visitors in their 50’s and 60’s were rare.  They are the Korea and Vietnam veterans.  Far fewer in numbers, they increasingly resent the continual accolades poured onto the older veterans from World War Two.  On an individual basis, their experiences are just as compelling, terrifying, and heroic as those in World War Two .  In fact, the greatest resentment exists among veterans of “black ops” or clandestine operations.

More interestingly, there were few visitors in their 40’s.  This generation of “Gen-Xers” is increasingly resentful of paying their tax dollars for the many Medicare recipients who don’t actively manage their own individual health care with diet, nutrition, and exercise.  The “Greatest Generation” to them, unfortunately, implies the greatest wasters of government money in history.

Veterans of the Greatest Generation rightfully deserve the greatest respect, but not all of it.  After all, the distance between respect and resent is only a bayonet’s edge.