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When my parents lived in New Orleans, I loved visiting the World War II museum with my dad.
My mother had grown up in New Orleans before she met my father at Ole Miss and moved to Jackson, Mississippi. For most Mississippians who lived in Jackson or further south, New Orleans was our Las Vegas. It was a place you could eat and drink and do all manner of things that you couldn’t do in Mississippi. There was an assumed sophistication and elevated status about all things new Orleanian.
I relished it when I was in my teens and early twenties. But later, I came to see it as a self-indulgent failed city where the greatest good was getting drunk and throwing beads at strangers from parade floats.
Hurricane Katrina exposed the ugly truth about New Orleans, like turning on the lights after the 4:00 a.m. closing time of a Bourbon Street strip club. For too long, the Uptown gentry had conducted a social experiment of what would happen if the most privileged of a culture valued eating and drinking more than the usual building blocks of a productive society. If at an uptown dinner party, someone had admitted they worked 60 hours a week and found it fulfilling, a hush would have fallen over the table and the conversation would have moved on, trying to ignore this egregious and self-damning faux pas. Better to make a compelling case that the age of consent should be lowered from the overly protective seventeen to fourteen. Kids grow up so fast these days.
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But the great exception to the hedonistic mediocrity of New Orleans is the World War II museum. Opening on June 6, 2000, on the 56th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the project began as a conversation between historian Steven Ambrose and Dwight Eisenhower on the critical role of the New Orleans-based Higgins Industries that built the iconic landing craft that carried Europe’s liberators to the beaches of Normandy.
Capturing a war unlike any in human history in one museum would seem an impossible task, but the success of the effort can be judged by the reaction of my father and other World War II veterans. When someone of my father’s age entered the museum, the staff would ask if they were a vet, and if so, they would quickly be surrounded by a clapping group of staff and volunteers celebrating their service. When I visited with my father, I always found it deeply moving. After the initial greeting, the staff and volunteers would quietly fade away and leave my dad and other vets to wander through their memories in the different rooms dedicated to campaigns of that most horrible and long struggle.
My dad’s war was the South Pacific, where he spent three years fighting from island to island as an officer on an LST. The Navy called them Landing, Ships, Tanks but my father always referred to them as large, slow targets. For 3 years, he lived on that ship without a night ashore.
His younger brother was an Army officer who was grievously wounded in Germany. Shot seven times, he never fully recovered. He dedicated his life to Civil Rights law, in part, moved by watching so many die fighting for the basic values of human dignity and freedom.
After the war, they returned to Mississippi and, like hundreds of thousands of others, went about building their lives and rarely spoke about what they had done and seen. It wasn’t until the World War II museum’s oral history project interviewed my father that I learned much about his experience in the war...

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