Now they easily recite the names of the five invasion beaches at Normandy. They understand the difficulty of Gen. Eisenhower's decision to go forward with the invasion despite a less than perfect weather report: "It couldn't be a full moon, which would be too bright, or a new moon, which would be too dark."
Dramatic anecdotes punctuate our discussions of Gen. George S. Patton's infamous slap of a soldier heard 'round the world, of Rommel's miscalculation of the timing of the Normandy invasion that began while he was in Berlin delivering shoes from a Paris shop to his wife for her birthday. These incidents are not in the game, and a little extra reading humanizes the leaders.
The game enables them to take pride in the bravery of our soldiers as they move electronically up the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. This is the war up close and it's not pretty, no matter how detailed the background pictures are, but the game makes more sense than those animated comedies and comics where danger and death are reduced to a brightly colored cartoon.
Interspersed between the game's violent scenes are footnotes to the meaning of war, of Robert E. Lee's remark at Fredericksburg as he watched the mighty armies of the Blue and the Gray gathering below Marye's Heights: "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it."
Video games can be mindlessly escapist, desensitizing children to blood and gore, and must be closely monitored lest children play only games instead of thinking about the world they inhabit. But some of the new war games rely on facts and context as well as dexterity. The U.S. military uses video games to train soldiers in specific skills, the careful handling of weapons, in critical thinking, the importance of teamwork, of knowing when, and when not, to shoot.
Process is as important as content. The games require patience and an appreciation for delayed gratification. It ain't chess, but it ain't bad.