Another element—this one required by the contest—is the flag. The designers describe the march to the flag as a march “towards a goal, an end . . . the experience of moving into and through war, of release from war into the embrace of peace and the reflection upon war.”59 The flag, in this description, is a symbol of the peace for which the soldiers fought. Another central feature of the original design, as the designers saw it, was an embedded narrative about this movement through war:
In the first third of the line, the figures would be placed so as to convey caution, uncertainty, and causalities in the first part of the war; the second third would begin with the figure of a platoon leader, the only figure not facing the flag. He would symbolize the achievement of order and purpose, and the figures would take on highly ordered, forward moving configuration. In the third section the order would continue, but the figures would be placed farther apart, symbolizing the decreased frequency of combat and the negotiation of truce. The last soldier would be in a posture of reflection; he has achieved success in military action.60
This is a fairly complicated narrative and would have been a challenge to convey in physical form. The designers compounded this challenge with their ideas about the figures themselves.
The Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas, and Pennypacker Oberholtzen design requirements for the figures were vague, and they wanted the figures themselves to be vague. They describe the soldiers as “ghostly,” “ethereal,” “impressionistic,” and “utterly lacking detail.”61 The designers did not produce sketches of what this might look like; without sketches, all parties in all the agencies involved seem to have imagined the figures as they thought they should be. And what they imagined was all over the map. The ideas proved impossible to reconcile. If the design had been more specific, the boards and agencies might well have rejected it. And so, in a memorial intended to represent soldiers in a way that might inspire sacrifice in future conflicts, there was an enormous struggle over the literal representation of the body of the soldier.
On June 14, 1989, in his remarks at the official unveiling ceremony for the design, President George H. W. Bush, never beloved as a rhetorician, stumbled through his speech on liberty, honor, Lincoln, and sacrificing soldiers. His uncertainty was both understandable and revealing. The initial design for the memorial was confusing in its efforts to represent sacrifice and the war. It was an evocative if sometimes perplexing mix, but, in the end, its nonrepresentational figures were not nearly specific enough. The memorial that needed to be built because the soldiers need to be remembered in terms different from those used at the Vietnam Memorial required remembering heroic figures above all else.
THE SUBSEQUENT DESIGNS: GI JOE ON THE MALL
Drawn to the simplicity of the line of figures, the reviewing agencies—the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC)—had provisionally approved the Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas design. But the design approval process imploded over disagreements about the physical details of the representation of the soldiers. Shortly after the design was unveiled, each of the agencies involved—the ABMC, the CFA, and the NCPC—began to express misgivings about how the other agencies were thinking about the figures. There were concerns about scale. Thirty-eight armed figures stretching the length of a football field would certainly put the forgotten war on the map, but were these appropriate dimensions? The approving agencies were sure from the start that they were not. The agencies also began pushing the design to be more responsive to its highly charged site. This debate was quickly trumped by more specific concerns about what the figures would look like.
From the start, the CFA and the NCPC wanted the memorial to be more “inclusive.”62 Although neither race nor ethnicity was mentioned anywhere in the design competition instructions, the prospect of thirty-eight white figures representing the first desegregated American fighting force was recognized as a problem. J. Carter Brown insisted that the figures be raced.63 At the same time, the KWMAB and the ABMC were pushing for crisp military detail. Neither crisp detail nor racial specificity formed part of the original design. Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas team member Don Leon is emphatic that racial and military designations were absolutely not part of the designers’ thinking. They envisioned “non-representational” figures. Race was “not at all” part of their vision; what they had in mind could not support that level of detail.64
The importance for the ABMC of a high level of detail in the figures was made clear in the spring of 1990 at a meeting held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington to choose the sculptor for the memorial. Three finalists had been selected: Frank Gaylord, Rolf Kirken, and Lawrence Ludtke. As architect Kent Cooper recounts, “Gaylord, a WWII combat veteran, made a riveting oral presentation and his emotion-packed, three-dimensional studies captured everyone’s attention. He was clearly the winner.”65 As Don Leon describes the meeting, Ludtke went first, and his realistic but casually rendered figures infuriated General Stilwell, the chair of the KWMAB. The open collars of their shirts, their lack of fitness, and their state of disarray enraged him. Ludtke told Stilwell, “With all due respect, Sir, I was in that army, I was on that march, and this is what it looked like.” Stilwell replied, “That may be what it looked like but that is not how we are going to remember it.” Leon describes this remarkably candid exchange about forging the nation with an invented past as the beginning of the end for his design.66 Not only was Stilwell clear that his invented past was the one to be remembered, but his vision required far more detail than the designers had ever wanted.
Even if they had envisioned realistically rendered figures, the problem of who to represent would likely have trumped the problem of how to represent the soldiers. A few months before the meeting at the Corcoran, architects from Cooper-Lecky, the architect of record for the VVM, were called in to oversee this memorial. They were soon making revisions for all the agencies. The initial revisions focused on “commemorative quotas”—service distribution and ethnic distribution. Four statues were designated as KATUSAs (Korean Augment to the U.S. Army, Korean soldiers who serve with the U.S. military). The remaining thirty-four statues were given racial and ethnic designations: nineteen Caucasians, six Hispanics, five African Americans, two American Indians, and two Asian Americans. This distribution, which was not easily reached, was problematic from the start. According to Barry Schwartz, “Designers noted that African Americans made up 10% of the troops, mainly in the ‘non-technical skills areas,’ which implies that their service was less valuable.”67 The number of Korean War veterans who were Puerto Rican, and therefore not seen as fully legitimate U.S. citizens by some of the parties involved, complicated the number of Hispanics to represent. A compromise reduced the number of Hispanics from six to five to avoid including more Hispanics than African Americans.68
Although the sterile language of “commemorative quotas” kept the focus on numbers, the problem was not just about figural specificity or numbers per race; it was a profound problem of refiguring the soldier in the United States. In the national context, representing soldiers who are not white has been tricky. The figures at the Vietnam Memorial, the first to do this on the Mall, are complicated figures. The Three Servicemen represents the Vietnam veteran as not always white, but it follows a familiar, well-worn racial hierarchy. The figure in the center is white and is the tallest. He is a half step ahead of the other figures and holds out his arms to protect them.69 Another figure is clearly African American. The third figure, the machine gunner, is an “ethnic mix.”70 Sculptor Frederick Hart used some Latino models because he wanted to include Latinos, but he also included “features that could also be Slavic, Eastern European, or Near Eastern.” Figures during the last period of interest in memorials, the post–Civil War memory boom, are almost entirely white, and they quite explicitly define soldiering in white terms. For the Korean War Veterans Memorial, this was a loaded problem with a complicated history.
Even