About veterans...

I'm sure that some of you (Ok, maybe all of you) are tired of hearing about the Enola Gay exhibit controversy, but since I have been researching the topic for my final paper, I thought I'd comment on one of the issues involved in the incident.
      Prior to the museum beginning work on the exhibit, many of the curators as well as the director received hundreds, perhaps thousands of letters from veterans who were increasingly frustrated with how slow the National Air and Space Museum was being with getting the plane put on display. They expressed their outrage that such a historic plane was being stored instead of publicly displayed. Unfortunately, their letters demonstrated their complete lack of understanding of how museums work- it's very, very difficult for a museum of any kind to restore a B-29, let alone find a place to store it. What was more, the letters also showed no tolerance towards any other perspective than their own.
  Reading so many letters that were of the same thinking was very frustrating, but it reminded me of a part of my historiography class in my undergrad studies where we covered what was called flesh-witnessing and eye-witnessing. Both of these involve using testimonies from people who had seen a historic event take place themselves. The difference, at least in the case of veterans, is that with flesh-witnesses, their testimony oftentimes challenges the authority of historians. This usually occurs when a veteran insists on his perspective as being the correct one, while usually also criticizing historians as being revisionists who ignore their part in history. In my historiography class, we had a class discussion about how seriously we as historians should consider first-hand accounts of events when trying to tell history to others.Obviously for trying to describe to people what being at an event first-hand would be like, a veteran's account would be very useful- there's nothing that can substitute for a look at war through the eyes of a soldier (I can attest to this myself, having interviewed several). However, there are also problems with using this testimony.
  Where do we, as public historians, then draw the line? I would argue that using the descriptions of the events themselves is where their testimony fits into a museum environment. That said, we should separate the recollections from the opinions. The majority of veterans are not experts on history- they have not be trained as historians, and they probably haven't done any of the research that historians have done, especially in the last thirty years. What's more, they are most certainly not unbiased, and are oftentimes not open to alternatives.
   The Enola Gay exhibit was stopped because of this unyielding opinion. Adding to this the knowledge that we as a society general hold our veterans in high esteem (as we should), it made it very difficult for the museum staff to succeed in their efforts to tell a balanced story. How then do go about telling history like the Enola Gay in the future? I personally would suggest that we keep the factual accounts and personal opinions separate, but this is obviously much more difficult said than done. Any thoughts?