FIGURE 6. Korean War Veterans Memorial. (Photo by Hank Savage.)
These elements in the battle to figure the soldier in this war memorial make painfully clear both the importance of representing the soldier in particular terms—heroic, manly, gallant, not-too-not-white, virile, successful, and so on—and the difficulties of constructing memory in these terms. Barry Schwartz argues that the “dignity of the veteran is affirmed by representing his identification with the state.”102 This seems right but was not enough for the builders of this memorial. The veterans sought straightforward acknowledgment of their service and sacrifice. The ABMC and the eventual architects required identifying with the state and defining the soldier in very particular terms.
SERVICE AND DISSERVICE IN THE MEMORIAL
In 1969, a young Bill Clinton wrote a now infamous letter explaining his position on the Vietnam War draft. In it he raised questions about the legitimacy of the draft system: “No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.”103 He continued, “The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. . . . Nor was Korea, an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.”104 He ends the letter, “I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice.”
It is just this fissure that the Korean War Veterans Memorial sought to breach. The men and women pushed by the Vietnam War to loathe the military could see in the determined grief of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial an expression of their sense of loss and disconnection. The Memorial Advisory Board and the American Battle Monuments Commission explicitly sought, early in the era of the all-volunteer military, to rewrite that logic for understanding military service. They wanted to equate service with honor and to express pride and gratitude. To do this, they avoided the problem that had so vexed the young Clinton: what the soldiers were doing in the world. They inscribed the insistently generic words, “Our Nation Honors Her Uniformed Sons and Daughters Who Answered Their Country’s Call to Defend a Country They Did Not Know and a People They Had Never Met,” at the feet of a line of nineteen marching figures because more detail about the war or the vital interests at stake would muddy the waters, would get in the way of the great marching men.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Korean War Veterans Memorial and hailed the memorial as “a magnificent reminder of what is best about the United States.”105 What Clinton celebrated in the memorial was the diversity of those who served, the traces of race that barely survived the memorial process: “In this impressive monument we can see the figures and faces that recall their heroism. . . . [T]he creators of this memorial have brought to life the courage and sacrifice of those who served in all branches of the Armed Forces from every racial and ethnic group and background in America. They represent, once more, the enduring American truth: From many we are one.” This is a very generous, perhaps aspirational reading of the memorial that celebrates a nationalism justified by diversity in a moment when diversity was becoming an important trope. But without Clinton’s framing, this diversity is hard to see in the memorial. As the notes of the ad hoc committee make clear, the kind of diversity the memorializers could tolerate was quite limited. Clinton’s 1969 letter does a much better job of representing the problem that drove the building of the memorial than this 1995 speech does of representing the memorial itself.
In the end, though, the memorial is not unintelligible. Kent Cooper says of the memorial, “We have tried to give the veterans here what we could not give them with the Vietnam memorial.”106 He continues, “We are not glorifying war, but esteeming the honor of service to country. That is what the vets cried out for. . . . [T]he Korean War Veterans Memorial is in some way a tribute to simpler times. This is a monument to blind devotion.”107 What Cooper misses here is that simpler times would not have required blind devotion, and that the terms of the memory that became so determinative for this memorial were not what the veterans had cried out for. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were different in important and consequential ways. The memory of a UN-waged war with broad international support should not be used as a corrective to the memory of a war broadly criticized by the United Nations and by nations around the world.
Simpler times would have made for an easier memorial, but the problem of how to remember ultimately cannot be disconnected from the war itself. The problem of the “nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization” or of the racial and gender composition of that imagined nation did not disappear in the memorial process; rather, it drove the memorial process.108
What is just under the surface here, what Kent Cooper assumes will be logical, is that honoring service in this context requires avoiding all that the builders of the KWVM sought to correct in the Wall—especially the presence of loss and the implication of tragedy. The blind devotion of soldiers can only be celebrated when their deaths are honorable rather than tragic. Otherwise, cannon fodder is just cannon fodder. To ensure honorable deaths, the soldiers needed to be understood in terms of the sacrifice they made, with only the most oblique references to what they did in the world. The memorial, by celebrating the soldier in this context, allows the soldier to represent war and allows the work that the war might have done in the world, the global implications of the war and the challenges that it might have presented to U.S. nationalism, to recede out of sight and therefore out of both the past and the present that the memorial constructs.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial is a complicated, multidimensional response to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the questions it raised on the Mall about remembering American wars and remembering American soldiers. The need for a particular kind of nationalism, manifest—militarized and domesticated—in the Korean War Memorial process, gains momentum, gets complicated, and is refigured in the monuments that follow it on the Mall. During the time the Korean War Memorial was fought over and built, three attempts were made to use the ascension of the figure of the soldier to challenge the figuring of that soldier and the figuring of the nation. The problem of sacrificing soldiers as “traced with race” and that of the insistent figuring of the soldier as not only male but masculine in particular heroic, virile terms were taken up and fought over in the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, and the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II. The chapters that follow take up the stories of these memorials.
TWO
Legitimating the National Family with the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial
My own great grandfather, John Curtis, a white man from Maine, gave his life for the cause of freedom during the Civil War when he was gunned down at Cold Harbor, Virginia. But for the photograph he took days before, and which was passed down to me, there would be no memorial.
MAURICE BARBOZA
THE STORY OF THE BLACK Revolutionary