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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ledded" data-source="post: 1196281" data-attributes="member: 12744">I just wanted to say, real quick, I appreciate this sentiment coming from a european (even if it was meant tongue-in-cheek and I took it wrong).I know that Americans can get very annoyingly cowboy (especially to the french) about our role in WWII (which I doubt very few people on these boards was alive for), but several of us grew up on stories of sacrifice by relatives and friend's relatives during the war, and it's nice to see that sometimes they get their props.For myself, my grandfather's brother, an italian immigrant who came to America as a very small child sometime around 1920 (how's that for timing), died invading Sicily with the American army (how's that for irony).A great uncle on my mothers side, died at the age of 18 in the Ardennes.  My best friend growing up had a great uncle who lost part of a lung and 3 fingers on his left hand driving a tank for Patton during the relief of Bastogne, and he was never bitter about it even though he had trouble with his injuries his entire life (he always said "well, it was d*mn worth what I got outta it.").I could probably recount a ton more, but that would only bore folks.As far as history, I agree with a lot of the posters on both sides of this argument;  we don't know or necessarily have the exact right details of everything that has happenned over the last 1000 years, but for the most part we do seem to have the general gist of it down, at least most of what mattered.   It's in the individual details and cultural motivations that we tend to lose coherence, and sometimes that can be quite important, other times not.  As sort of an amateur armchair historian, the more I learn about history, the more I realize how little I know.Think of it this way;  how much has changed about what we teach children today about American history differs from what we were taught as children?  Which is right, or wrong?  I can't tell you, but I can tell you that I personally try to base my impressions on specific events more on the amount of evidence people have uncovered about them and less of the accepted view of the event, and even then I've been wrong quite a few times.</blockquote>

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