I'd be a bit slower to belittle the experience or the perspective of present and former US military personnel who have visited or been stationed in Europe.

Once, long ago, too long for most here to recall, France was a fully participating military partner in NATO and there were a number of US bases in France, the most significant of which was the headquarters of the US Navy's 6th Fleet in Villefranche. By 1962, France had essentially withdrawn from military participation (but still maintained a shadow force in W. Germany/Berlin, a remnant of the old Allied Occupation Forces). USN ships regularly called in Cannes, Nice, Toulon, Marseilles, Villefranche and Ajaccio, occasionally calling in Atlantic ports, with routine air operations out of Merignac.

Generations of USN sailors - dating back to the 1790s - have likely spent more time in France than most US tourists ever do, although the clubs of Golfe Juan used to be a bit rowdy for the tourist trade. A series of port calls enabled me to see the sights in Gras, Aix, Carcasonne, Avignon, and other tourist draws mildly inland. A couple of visits as a very junior Ensign, by the luck of the draw assigned as the ship's Shore Patrol Officer, provided a couple of weeks in close contact with the flics, both the local gendarmerie and the plain clothes security types (an obnoxious lot, were they DST?).

When France withdrew from NATO, USN command structures moved down to Naples, the base in the suburb of Bagnoli, and the NATO command at Casserta in the old Royal Palace. There was (and still may be) a great little US enclave, Camp Darby, between Livorno and Pisa, with the luxury of dairy products from the US Army's dairy facility in Austria, IIRC, and US bacon.

Between 1944 and today, millions and millions, of US servicemen have spent tours, some short, some for many years, in Western Europe. While most may have been young and naive, the existing or acquired sophistication of them and others, perhaps below the lofty standards of many FTers, was notable. I attended the funeral of retired nurse, a USArmy Colonel, a couple of weeks ago. She had first come to Germany with the USArmy in 1945, returned in 1949 and because of her acquired German had spent almost half of her career there (and returned frequently after retirement). I suspect that she was far more familiar with Germany (and Germans) than almost any German visitor to the US becomes with this country, even the German Army and Air Force types who do long tours at Fort Bliss and the adjacent air base, for many years with regular Luftwaffe flights back to Germany. I imagine that even Elvis learned more about the Germans than most Euopeans ever acquire about life in the US. Even my kid sister and her husband, young Army docs staioned at Bremerhaven and near Frankfurt for a couple of years in the early 80s, became and remain pretty good resources for planning German travel.