Youtube hearted comments of Evan (@MrEvanfriend).
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I find a lot of this highly tacky and disrespectful. Exhibiting the working vehicles and equipment of the era is certainly valuable (and probably really fun as well). The rest of this? It's foolish and satirical.
This isn't an assault on a beach. It isn't training for an assault on a beach. It's amateur theater posing as history, and in doing so, it gives a lot of false impressions, and inhibits understanding rather than increasing it.
These guys are playing army. They're doing so with nice costumes and good gear, but in the end, they're still playing. That silliness is not what the invasion at Normandy was like. Sure, the clothes and equipment are correct, but the atmosphere is, by necessity, sanitized past the point where it can be called a "reenactment". There's no life or death struggle here. There's no risk - nothing is at stake, we all know the good guys win, and at the end of the day, nobody gets hurt and everyone takes off their costumes and has a beer together. I find all of this deeply disrespectful. War is serious, it's hard, and it can be hellish. It isn't a lark for a weekend before heading back to your job as an accountant or whatever on Monday morning - and trying to "reenact" it as such misses all the important points so hard that this can only be considered satire.
That a few WWII vets shook hands with these clowns struck me as sad. I'm a veteran myself. I know that if, 50 years from now, I see a bunch of clowns dressed up like Marines "reenacting" Fallujah, I'll step in and put a stop to it.
I understand that this is (largely) done in good faith. But good faith or not, it isn't, and shouldn't be acceptable. It's not quite stolen valor, but it's very close. Nobody with actual military experience would walk through that camp and see soldiers. A bunch of middle-aged fat guys (and women!) dressed in appropriate costumes does not a military camp make, and the atmosphere and general demeanor of everyone involved is entirely unlike that of a military unit.
The vehicles are really cool - tanks and planes and everything else. I'm all for that kind of stuff. A demonstration of the individual soldier's gear also has some value. But mash this all together into a bloodless (literally and figuratively) pretend "invasion", and you're diminishing any historical understanding you get from the demonstrations, and essentially making a mockery of history and of the men who fought and died there.
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