QUANTICO, VA. - Lance Cpl. Matthew Stephens, who returned to Camp Lejeune from Iraq just last month, figures that for the new National Museum of the Marine Corps to truly convey his experience in Ramadi, the exhibit hall would have to be the pitch black of night.

Tourists would have to run, dashing across pockmarked pavement in night-vision goggles, aiming their weapons at every window, tensed for any sound that might be either a cat jumping off a wall or six insurgents about to open up.

Their hearts would be pounding, their breath coming hard, the hunger and exhaustion long ago faded to leave only adrenaline and, maybe, a bit of fear.

That, anyway, is how it was for Stephens.

"You'll never fully understand war unless you were there," he said. "It does a number on your mind."

The museum, which opens to the public Nov. 13, just after Veterans Day, can't replicate the experiences of Marines who have served in battle since the Revolutionary War.

But it will try.

By leading visitors through darkened exhibits, piping in the whizzes of bullets and the wash of a chopper's rotor blades, the museum's creators aim to educate visitors about the Marines' work in wars that, often, the grunts themselves didn't fully understand.

There will be oral histories about bloody battles, a notebook of letters home from troops, a wall of coin-sized insignias, one for each of more than 6,000 lives lost in Iwo Jima.

"I think the most important thing this museum can do is put you in the position Marines were in and let you draw your own conclusions," said Lin Ezell, the museum's director. "There's no right or wrong answer. We're not guiding. We're just saying, 'This is what happened.' "

The museum opens as the United States' civilian and military leadership is struggling with a war that brings near-daily reports of casualties. At any time, 25,000 Marines are serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more than 840 have died.

More than 230 of those were from North Carolina or were stationed at Camp Lejeune.

"I think there's two sides to museums," said Stephens, 20, of Hoover, Ala. "Number one, there's the experience: 'Oh my God, they had to do that?' Teaching what they're going through.

"And then teaching for the future: 'Man, this is what happens when people start wars?' "

Planning for the $90 million Marines museum began in 1999, long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It took years for the Corps' heritage foundation to raise the millions in a public-private partnership to hire architects, collect artifacts, figure the best way to tell the Marines' story.

Founders decided to celebrate the grunts, rather than the generals, and to build on the Corps' long tradition of inspiring young Marines through its history. The museum includes three "immersion" exhibits that attempt to help visitors experience battles in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

What you'll see

There may be a lot of traffic from North Carolina. Camp Lejeune, some three hours southeast of Raleigh, is one of the service's largest bases. Just north of Lejeune is Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.

Visitors traveling north on Interstate 95 first will be struck by the museum's architecture, a twisting pyramid of glass and steel soaring skyward at an angle that evokes the famous image of the Iwo Jima flag-raising in World War II.

Inside, visitors walk into the expansive "Leatherneck Gallery," a towering atrium strung with Marines aircraft and surrounded by famous quotes etched high in the stone walls.

"Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?" reads one from 1st Sgt. Dan Daly, yelling to his men during a charge in World War I. Ezell expects the gallery will be a place of reflection, especially for older veterans.

"They will have emotions," she said. "You'll confront ghosts and demons and heroes. And yourself."

Beyond the atrium, visitors face combat.

In Korea's Chosin Reservoir, 250 men of the Fox Company hunkered along the icy Toktong Pass supply route, spending five days defending it from an onslaught of Chinese communist soldiers, said retired Col. Joseph Alexander, a Marines historian from Asheville who consulted for the museum and wrote about 800 captions for the exhibits.

Half the men were killed.

To fully explain that standoff, the museum would have to import piles of dead bodies, plunge the temperature to 20 below zero, invoke frostbite in its visitors and keep them awake for days in foxholes, overwhelmed by the stench of human waste and death.

"The smell of war is death," said retired Maj. Richard Spooner, a member of the museum's historic foundation, who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. "It's awful. I'm sorry, but war is a thing that can't be described. But we hope they'll see enough of it to see that strong men have made many sacrifices on their behalf."

In the museum, the moonlit TokTong pass will be a chilly 58 degrees, with the outline of Chinese soldiers' bodies in the snow. There will be flares and the shouts of Marines.

But it won't be war.

"I can't get there. I can suggest it," Alexander said.

In the Vietnam exhibit, visitors pass through the fuselage of a CH-46 helicopter amid the sounds of bullets pinging off the metal and shouts to get the hell off as visitors descend into the hot zone of Hill 881 South. Nearby, a life-size Marine chaplain kneels over a dead troop.

"But nobody's shooting at you," Alexander said. "You can't hear the shriek of the mortar coming in, the final blast of it going off and the screams. There's not a cloud of dust to choke you.

"You're actually just walking into a diorama."

The tools of war draw the curiosity of children and adults alike, said Richard Kohn, a former chief of history for the Air Force and a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. "It's a fascinating issue. Why do people kill each other?"

Curators spent years gathering artifacts and poring through documents to create the exhibits. The museum reconstructed a bullet-riddled building in Vietnam from an old photograph, punctured the tire on a howitzer because the tires frequently went flat from flying shrapnel. To re-create the sands of battlefields, curators sent soil samples to the exhibit designers.

Some designers are themselves former peace activists who had been uncomfortable with troops -- but now feel some kinship.

"Maybe the museum's changed my mind a little bit," said scenic artist Pam Barlowe, kneeling on the floor as she stuffed sandbags one by one. She looked over to a mannequin Marine aiming a machine gun from a bunker.

"What's changed my mind is, it's a chance for families to heal," Barlowe said. "People come in here, and they start talking about their old wounds."

Memories of combat remain fresh for Stephens, the Marine from Lejeune. Now home on leave, he looks into society and sees ambivalence about Iraq.

"But if you can get a museum that presents information, then maybe people can open up a little bit and say, 'Wow, I didn't know they were going through that,'" he said. "It's all about people caring."

Iraq tough to portray

The national museum holds little from America's current war, but curators already are thinking how best to honor its fighters.

"It's impossible to put into historic perspective what's happening today," Ezell said. Still, she added, the museum couldn't very well open without something on the war on terror.

So one room will be dedicated to combat photography and artwork, showing Marines assisting with recovery at the World Trade Center and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alexander, the retired colonel from Asheville, wants the nation's next generation of politicians and security advisers to visit museums like this one, to think about what's going on now and what could happen in future conflicts.

"It might make them think about what the sacrifices are," Alexander said. "Here's what the cost is. Is it worth it? Often it is."