Happy Birthday to the US Army!
It would be a big cake since the US Army was founded in 1775.
And it also happened that I was traveling into central Pennsylvania today and took a short detour and spent a few hours touring the US Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, PA.
Outdoor photos of various objects of interest:
s29.photobucket.com
The Heritage Center is open to the public and admission is free. Inside there are a few exhibits and a bookstore as well as a first-class research library (which you need to register to use I believe.) Current exhibits were one on the US Army as the US Civil War started and also an interesting exhibit on General Omar Bradley.
Outside is a walking trail of about one mile that moves through outdoor exhibits for various periods of US military history (Revolutionary War, US Civil War, World War I, World War II, Viet Nam, and what I expect will be a Gulf War/Iraq exhibit.)
The facility seems to still be a work in progress. Some outside areas are still incomplete or have other signs of still being worked on. There are obvious indications that the displays and exhibits are intended to be used for school class education and can handle visiting students. (A very good sign in my opinion.)
And most of the displays have a very personal touch in that the signs often include some information on a particular soldier in that period who participated in the action being used as the sample for that era (Yorktown, Antietum, D-Day, Ia Drang). This is an effective way to point out the participation of the country’s citizens in war, and also makes what otherwise is a fairly static display of equipment or facilities much more human.
All in all the Heritage Center is probably worth the 1-2 hour visit if one is passing nearby and wants to get a quick overview of US military history. It’s close to both the PA Turnpike and I-81 (which is in the background of a few of the photos.) If one is a buff of something like the US Civil War than one would probably be better served visiting the nearby Antietum or Gettysburg battlefields whose visitor centers will be much more detailed in that particular era.