The language of this call is determinative and also stylistically prescriptive.49 They wanted a memorial that would be “reflective,” “uplifting,” “respectful,” and an expression of “pride.”50 They also wanted it to express “hope,” “honor,” “service,” and “gratitude.” They further required that all military details—weapons and uniforms—be portrayed in “exquisite detail.” This alone not only ruled out abstraction but dramatically limited the range of aesthetic possibilities. Further, the statement required that the American flag be featured as a central design element. And the call was explicit about the role of grief: “Any design which has inherent in it an essence of grief is not acceptable.” The statement called for attention to sacrifice without grief, without even “an essence of grief.”
The call for designs could not have been more clear about the board’s position on the VVM and the consequences of this position for the KWVM. They did not want to list names of the dead because they didn’t want “the emotional reaction characteristic of the Vietnam wall.”51 They wanted to honor sacrificing without getting into the details of sacrifice. In fact, they didn’t want anything characteristic of the VVM to be present in Ash Woods. They sought an anti-Wall. Like the conversations around the memorial legislation, the design competition was not shaped by particular questions about the war itself. G. Holcomb’s thinking about a possible memorial to a heterogeneous, internationally summoned fighting force—or any other concept reflecting the Cold War or the United Nations or other ideas about Korea between 1950 and 1953—was strikingly absent. Only a vague notion of freedom remained. The need to inspire future sacrifice was much more pressing for the AMBC and the KWMAB; it would determine the shape of the memorial. In the statement, the only specifics about the war refer to an uncomplaining willingness to defend “a nation they never knew and a people they never met. . . . [Our troops] fought brilliantly and tirelessly and enabled our nation to achieve its aims—and to prove to ourselves, and the world, that America comes to the aid of its friends, defends it principles, and never retreats from freedom’s fight.” This statement does not include any direct reference to Korea, Koreans, the Cold War, stalemates, demilitarized zones, or even communism.52
Despite the complexities of this call, the winning design—one of 543 entries—was remarkable. It was an intriguing, complicated symbolic expression. It aspired to speak to the “dualities and paradoxes of war and truth” and to “contribute to an historical understanding of the Korean conflict.”53 And it took very seriously the mandate to foreground the soldier. It sought to reflect on the particular experience of those who fought in Korea in a powerful gesture about what it felt like to be a soldier in the Korean War. Responding to interviews with veterans, the designers developed an interest in the Korean War as a walking war. One veteran’s observation that “we knew the war through our feet. . . . [W]e walked every inch of that country” became an organizing principal for the design.54 It was a line of thirty-eight nine-foot-tall, fully armed, “ethereally” rendered granite figures that stretched 350 feet toward an American flag.55 The flag was set at the center of a plaza defined on its western edge by a seven-foot-high wall carved with bas-reliefs and inscriptions. A thin red line of granite was to move through the line of soldiers to the flag to create the sense of a journey through war. There was an awful lot going on in this design: the soldiers, the soldiers, the soldiers; the desire to emphasize the walking war; the spectacular scale; the centrality of the flag; the use of the number thirty-eight; the narrative of a journey; and finally, the ethereal rendering of the figures. All these elements are worth teasing out a little, but it was the last—the figuring of the soldier—that would determine the shape of the memorial that was built on the Mall.
Veronica Burns Lucas, of the winning four-member design team from Pennsylvania State University, told the press at the unveiling that the team connected with the idea of a war known through the soldiers’ feet. She said that they were drawn to this, in part, by a famous David Douglas Duncan photograph.56 Duncan took the photograph in August 1950. In it, the soldiers, newly arrived in Korea, are making their way north to defend the Pusan Perimeter along the Naktong River.57 Looking at the photograph now and knowing something about the war, one sees the march as tense. They are going into battles that many of them won’t survive. They will eventually push the North Koreans and Chinese back over the thirty-eighth parallel, and then the North Koreans and Chinese will push back again before they reach a stalemate. The proposed design echoed elements of both the Duncan photograph and the memories of veterans of the walking war.
The black-and-white photograph of soldiers walking a dirt road through a deep valley is fascinating. The soldiers, in the foreground, are walking toward the camera on a dusty white road. The thin dotted black line they form on the road immediately draws the eye. More soldiers are standing and sitting by jeeps on the side of the road, also looking at the moving line of soldiers and emphasizing the centrality of the line. But the background of the photograph—the dark, looming mountain range—also draws the eye. A striking landscape of black and gray mountains under building gray clouds competes with the line of soldiers for the viewer’s attention. The tension between foreground and background and the relative emptiness of the middle ground seem to speak to the problems of remembering the soldier rather than the war; the soldier is literally foregrounded in bold terms, and the photograph, as a result, seems hollowed out, empty despite its dramatic elements.
There is, however, an important distinction between the way the photograph represents the soldiers and the way the design proposed to represent them. In the photograph, the figures are foregrounded, but they are also tiny, dwarfed by the dramatic landscape. In the memorial design, the scale is reversed. In fact, the scale of the design bordered on the outrageous: thirty-eight figures, nine feet tall, 350 feet long. This scale made the soldiers literally monumental, ensuring that they would dominate the landscape of Ash Woods and shift the focus away from anything beyond their presence. Depicting the soldiers as bigger than the landscape through which they move has serious implications: it represents them as bigger than what they were doing in the world.
This is what enabled designer John Paul Lucas to tell the press that “patriotism is the primary narrative theme of the memorial.” He added, “We hope that visitors will be stimulated by the symbolism to think about the nature of the war itself.”58 It is significant that, for him, patriotism came first, then the nature of the war. And it is perhaps more significant that he speaks of the nature of the war in terms of the experience of the individual soldier—this is what this war felt like. Lucas and his fellow designers did not take up questions about why the war was waged or what it meant or what the outcome was. The designers, working within the perimeters of the design competition, were interested in the specificity of the experience of the soldier. A specific memory of the war, as they understood it, was a memory of what it felt like for the soldier rather than what it did in the world. If they had embraced Duncan’s scale, they would have created a very different sense of what the war felt like; figuring the soldiers as dramatically oversized is a powerful shift away from the photograph and the war.
The symbolic vocabulary used by Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas, and Pennypacker Oberholtzen is at once literal and oblique. The design contest did not explicitly require figures of soldiers, but it would be hard to satisfy the contest’s explicit stipulations—and nearly impossible to meet the implied requirements around celebrating heroism and honoring soldiers—without representing them. The Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas, Pennypacker Oberholtzen design used thirty-eight soldiers because the line between the North Korea and South Korea held at the thirty-eighth parallel and the war lasted thirtyeight months. This makes sense in a very literal way but also requires that the soldier’s bodies serve not to represent soldier’s bodies so much as lines on a map and days on a calendar. This seems especially problematic when the strong desire to remember a heroic war runs up against the realities of