I am not sure what you are talking about. They lived through the depression, lost 400,000 lives and over a million casualties during the war, rebuilt Japan and Europe, and paid off the WWII debt in seven years. Most of them are dead now, and they did not even ask for the Memorial. Their kids and people who respected them like me paid for that memorial. These people are a minimum of 80 years old at this time.
Some of them are still in their seventies, I believe. I heard that one vet went to war in 1943 (IIRC) as an eighteen or nineteen year old.