of an unwinnable, unpopular, complicated war in Southeast Asia. Many Americans seemed to want to understand themselves as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization, rather than an imperial global power waging the Cold War in newly claimed former French, British, and Japanese colonies. This desire drove the push to build these memorials.
The problem of military service in this period was also pertinent and pressing for these memorial projects. The all-volunteer military had, much to the surprise of many, a very successful beginning. In 1973, 1974, and 1975, the army’s modest recruiting goals were easily met.13 But by 1976 recruitment had clearly slowed, and by 1979 there was a 16,000-person shortfall that inspired army chief of staff General Edward Myer to tell Congress that the nation had a “hollow Army.”14 The army responded with increased salaries, increased incentives, and the “Be All You Can Be” advertising campaign. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was hardly helpful in this context; the Wall wasn’t an appealing companion to these campaigns. When the Korean War Memorial process began, Selective Service registration had recently been reinstated in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Department of Defense was worried about what would happen if some political incident required a sudden increase in volunteers; there was a lot of anxiety about the feasibility of an all-volunteer military in a wartime situation. As a result, even though in the late 1980s and early 1990s the military reduced its size, dramatically contracting the need for new recruits, the Department of Defense continued to need to raise pay and improve educational benefits in an effort to meet recruiting goals.15 These recruitment issues would certainly have been on the minds of some of the memorializers.
The story of the building of the KWVM, the debates it engendered, the debates it did not engender, the questions the memorial process raised about the nation, and the figure of the soldier are all linked to difficulties in reconciling old ideas about the nation and the new kinds of wars it was waging. The looming, pained soldiers at the center of this memorial are celebrated and sacrificed. The war in which they served is obscured in the memorial process. The rough, raw faces of the statues emerged from the battle over the figure of the soldier, embodying the struggle to move from the real, complicated experience of soldiers to a positive representation of the willingness to serve that might act as a corrective to the abstraction, the ambiguity, and the grief represented at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Korean War Veterans Memorial is not simple, but it strives to simplify and domesticate war and military service.
ORIGINS
Where is the Korean War memorial? Somehow I never can find that.
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.
