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 V: (312) 692-3136 F: (312) 939-8001 e: [log in to unmask] "Hmmm, Crunchy Frog!" -- M. Python, Episode 6, 1969