This may be getting slightly off-topic, but...

The First Division Museum at Cantigny in suburban Chicago follows the
history of that outfit, from its antecedents in the 18th and 19th
centuries, through it's formation in W.W.I, and to its tours or duty in
W.W.I, W.W.II, Vietnam, etc.  The displays include a series of
full-scale, walk-through immersion experiences: a 1918 trench, the beach
at Normandy, a Belgian town during the Battle of the Bulge, an
Indochinese jungle, etc.

In none of these do you see any dead or wounded.  A bloodied boot
sticking out of the top of a bombed-out tank is about the closest you
get to carnage.  In the trench, if you listen closely to the ambient
audio, you hear soldiers talking to an injured comrade as he slips away.
The "you-are-there" experience at Normandy has visitors emerge from the
bowels of a transport ship on the day *after* the invasion, landing on a
secured beach head.

I asked the Education Curator why they made these choices.  (It's been a
few years, so I don't recall her answer verbatim.)  She said the museum
felt that graphic depictions of carnage would overwhelm the exhibits'
historical messages.

And that's what exhibit development is all about -- selecting a message
and figuring out the clearest, most compelling way to express it.  I am
currently involved in developing an exhibit on coral reefs.  We can take
many approaches -- biological, taxonomic, ecological, etc.  We chose
"ecological" -- we want visitors to understand how the system works.
Thus, the biological information on the anatomy of a coral polyp is not
important to us (or important only insofar as it applies to the
ecological message).  There are people on our staff who continually
promote biological information for inclusion in the exhibit.  And we
must continually remind them that such information is very interesting
and very important but, unless it is also directly relevant to our
ecological message, it is excess baggage that needs to be pared away.

The same applies to any exhibit, including those on the military.  You
or I might want the message of the exhibit to be about the human cost of
war.  (And certainly, this is not ignored at Cantigny.)  But the museum
and its exhibit developers wanted to tell a different story -- the role
of this division in important military events.  They may have made this
decision for any number of reasons.  But the bottom line is: it was
their decision, and they made one.  And any information, experiences, or
elements that did not support their intended message were quite rightly
left out of the exhibit.

No exhibit can present all known information on a topic.  We always need
to pick and choose, and these decisions are frequently difficult.  But
the best exhibits make their selections to support a clearly conceived
message.

Eugene Dillenburg
Lead Developer, Philippines Coral Reef exhibit
John G. Shedd Aquarium
1200 South Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, Illinois  60605

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"Hmmm, Crunchy Frog!"

-- M. Python, Episode 6, 1969