E. G. WINDCHY
Both the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the National World War II Memorial have well-worn origins stories. Jan Scruggs came home from seeing The Deer Hunter determined to heal his national community. A constituent approached his congresswoman at a pancake supper in Ohio to ask her why there wasn’t a World War II memorial, and the lawmaker, stunned by the realization that there wasn’t one, embarked on a great crusade. In the case of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the impetus is probably also best traced to Jan Scruggs and The Deer Hunter. In newspapers, congressional arguments, and presidential speeches, the answer to the question, “Where did the drive to build the Korean War Memorial come from?” was almost always linked to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Crucially, there were two parts to these references to the Wall. The first was essentially that Korean War veterans should have a memorial because the Vietnam veterans have one. The second was that there should be a war memorial on the Mall that is not the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—not abstract, not about grief, not about loss, not about tragedy, not about the nation imagined by the Vietnam Memorial.
In 1955 the Washington Post and Times Herald published a short, lonely letter to the editor on the subject of a possible Korean War memorial. It read:
Each day I admire the altogether fitting and proper memorial statue honoring the courageous lads of America who planted the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II.
Now I’m wondering if there is a memorial somewhere for the equally courageous boys of United Nations who fought under many flags, including our own and that of the United Nations, to stop the aggression of the North Korean and Red China communists on the Korean peninsula.
That was a notable landmark in world history, when a number of nations joined together to stop an aggression which touched them only indirectly.
Men of all races and creeds died for freedom there. Should not there be a monument showing the heterogeneous qualities of those united forces? Would not that serve to remind us and others that even the “little wars” against free people (or even against unfree people) are important today?
G. Holcomb
Falls Church16
Borrowing Lincoln’s language at Gettysburg—“it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this”—G. Holcomb offers a complicated vision of what could be remembered about the Korean War. He foregrounds the “courageous boys” but suggests that what should be marked about the Korean War is that it was waged by the United Nations and fought by men of “all races and creeds.” When he asks, “Should not there be a monument showing the heterogeneous qualities of those united forces?” he asks a powerful question.
In 1955, memorials were not of much interest to most people in the United States. World War II was remembered mostly by local, living memorials, and renewed interest in memorialization was still at least twenty-five years away. In the immediate post–Korean War years, there were precious few letters to editors about Korean War memorials, and Holcomb’s cause was not taken up. But what he suggests should be remembered—a newly heterogeneous military (or, perhaps more accurately, a newly desegregated U.S. military) and a UN fighting force—are worth noting because these striking, logical, obvious terms for remembering the Korean War in the 1950s were absent when the memorial process began in the early 1980s. They had been replaced by the memorial needs and desires of the 1980s. In the conversations about the memorial, responding to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was far more pressing than remembering desegregated forces or a UN-waged war. Of course, remembrance on the National Mall of either race or a U.S. war fought multilaterally was thorny business, and these challenges did shape the memorial that was built. But, in the final design, both race and the United Nations are present only as traces.17
G. Holcomb was not entirely alone in his desire to see a memorial built. The American Battle Monuments Commission made some noise about raising funds in the mid-1960s. And in the preceding years, a few individuals tried to stir interest in a memorial. In Marlboro, New York, Eli Belil started pushing for a memorial in the late 1970s. Belil, a Korean War veteran and research director for Penthouse magazine, wrote letters to state and federal authorities, various veteran’s agencies, and the American Battle Monuments Commission, but got nowhere. He encountered “official roadblocks, ignorance, and apathy when it comes to recognizing the sacrifices of those of us who so long ago fought and paid the ultimate price for freedom in a faraway land.”18 It wasn’t until the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) was built that any serious momentum was gained for a Korean War memorial. In 1987, Belil expressed a common sentiment when he said, “I’m not knocking the Vietnam veterans and the fact that their memorial is finally a reality, but like Vietnam, Korea was a battleground in which almost as many men lost their lives over a shorter period of time. . . . [A]ll they have to show for it are a few fading pictures . . . and the scars that neither time nor the Government’s apathy will heal.”19 Belil attributes the pre-VVM lack of interest to the Korean War veterans’ unwillingness to “make waves,” indicating a generational difference between the Vietnam and Korean veterans but also implying that, before 1982, getting a war memorial built required making special, disruptive demands that the proud (and maybe more compliant?) Korean War veterans were unwilling to make. Holcomb was interested in remembering the war in the context of world history. Belil and the voices that emerged after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was completed were interested in something else: recognition for individual sacrificing soldiers and the need to heal.
The closest the KWVM gets to an origins story of its own dates to 1981, when Chayon Kim, a Korean-born naturalized U.S. citizen, formed the National Committee for the Korean War Memorial.20 Kim’s life had been saved by American troops during the war. She would later recount hours of “huddling in a bunker while American B-29s dropped bombs on North Korean troops all around her hiding place.”21 Inspired by a meeting with Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, Kim established a memorial committee comprising a few self-appointed individuals without governmental affiliations. Just one month after the spectacularly successful dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in December 1982, Kim was removed from the committee.22 Two years later, the committee dissolved in the face of serious financial improprieties.23 One-time committee member Myron McKee had taken advantage of veterans’ desire to see the memorial built as a way to line his own pockets, paying himself $650,000 to raise $600,000. Before this happened, however, Kim’s committee did make a couple of key contributions to the memorial process.
According to the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, in November 1982, at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, members of Kim’s committee distributed six thousand questionnaires that read: “If you are a veteran, we value your advice and participation in the building of the Korean War Memorial. (1) Above ground, visible, or below ground; (2) modern art or traditional art; (3) decisions by veterans or decisions by architects.”24 Only 350 questionnaires were returned, but the verdict was clear: above ground, traditional, and dictated by veterans. (This is almost but not quite what they got.) The questionnaire and its response clearly defined the Korean War Memorial principally as a response to the VVM. It set the terms of the debate explicitly around rewriting the Vietnam Memorial rather than the particular history of the Korean War. In the memorial process, rewriting “traditional art,” privileging the decisions of veterans, and lifting the memorial form above ground (resurrecting it, if you will) were of central importance to the memorial’s advocates. But each of these elements turns out to be more complicated, more slippery, than the questionnaire’s emphatic concision suggested.
“Traditional art,” for instance, used in juxtaposition to “modern art” in the survey, would have had a particular and quite pointed resonance in 1982. In the early Cold War era, U.S. federal agencies had embraced modernism to represent “American-style freedom of expression” in contrast to “Soviet-style repression.” However, by the 1980s popular rejection of modernism paved the way for a return to traditionalism. For historian Casey Nelson Blake, the 1993 Knoxville Flag outside of the General Services Administration building in Knoxville signaled “the replacement of modernism as an official style by a new patriotic realism, dressed up in the rhetoric