Most people got their WWII news via newsreels at the movie theater. All of them were carefully sanitized and had to pass government censors. Defeats were given a positive spin, and the toll on civilians inflicted by the "good guys" glossed over. Some of the newsreel-inspired mythology is still widely believed, such as the necessity of using atomic bombs to end the Pacific war or the firebombing of Dresden.
 
Vietnam changed all that with the introduction of television. The raw brutality of war was no longer something you could romanticize, and it fundamentally changed people's thinking about it. Those of my generation who were being forcibly snatched from their normal lives to participate in it had a real hard time thinking of it as a patriotic duty. It made you examine your most basic beliefs about morality. Worst of all, it made an entire generation come to distrust their government, a legacy that persists today and affects every aspect of modern governance. And it just keeps getting worse.
 
Nowadays, the internet makes different points of view available to all. Everybody outside of China, anyway. "Shock and Awe" becomes bits and pieces of children and a new understanding of why so much of the world hates us.
 
Maybe, if our fathers and grandfathers had talked more about it, we could have all benefited.
 
 (Moderators: this is neither a political nor a religious posting, and does not violate the TOS prohibition against them. Morality transcends - and trumps - the domains of both religion and politics.)