A word I hadn’t used for well over 50 years bubbled up from the depths of my vocabulary upon looking around the Veterans United Military Memorial Museum in New Gretna for the first time: Neat!

I was transported back in time to when I was a child, to the pre-Vietnam era in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the United States military had few, if any, detractors; when people of all stripes honored veterans; when far more families boasted a member of the armed forces than is the case today, thanks in part to a peacetime draft.