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 of conservative identity politics.”25 When Blake worries that “the ascendancy of neotraditionalist public monuments” will “imagine a public life with no surprises—no surprises from artists, no surprises from racial and ethnic minorities, no surprises from crime and violence, and no surprises, above all, from public protests and civil unrest,” he describes exactly what many of the questionnaire respondents and the veterans and agencies seeking to build the Korean War Memorial wanted: an explicit rejection of the possible ambiguities of modernism.26 Kim’s questionnaire, in the shadow of the decidedly modern and not clearly patriotic Vietnam Memorial, posited traditional art in the terms Blake describes, as “an official style of new patriotic realism.”
An October 1982 letter to the editor of the Washington Post written by E. G. Windchy of Alexandria captured the initial gentle push for a memorial for Korean War veterans: “Where is the Korean War memorial? Somehow I never can find that.”27 The tone of this letter—wry, gentle humor, not entitled outrage—is interesting. In 1982, with the buildup to the dedication of the VVM underway, it expressed a sense that if the Vietnam veterans were getting a memorial, the Korean War veterans should get one too. A few years later, the lack of a memorial would become a source of righteous anger for many. By 1985, the gentle chiding was gone; when Virginia representative Stan Parris, a Korean War veteran, introduced a bill calling for the building of a memorial to honor Korean War veterans in Washington, the congressional record was full of indignation.
This new indignation is reflected in the headlines that followed passage of the Korean War Veteran Act of 1985. The Christian Science Monitor headline “Giving Korean War Vets Their Due” captures the mood. The refrain in newspapers—“They don’t have one . . . and they should”—was repeated again and again. In the fall of 1985, a New York Times article begins, “Almost as many (54,259) died in the Korean War as in the Vietnam War (58,022) but there is no Korean War memorial in the Washington area,”28 and a Los Angeles Times editorial begins, “At least two decades late, a bill is moving through Congress to erect a Korean War memorial.”29 Remembering the forgotten war in these conversations had remarkably little to do with the war to be remembered. And, between G. Holcomb in 1955 and E. G. Windchy in 1982, a significant shift in logic is evident. Holcomb turned to Lincoln at Gettysburg to justify his interest in a memorial about the particular details of the war, while Windchy assumed that a memorial should be built because it was appropriate and the Vietnam veterans had one.
Kim’s committee, which successfully initiated the push for the memorial, lobbied at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedication not only for a Korean War memorial but also for the particular shape it should take. The committee explicitly marked the emergent Korean War Memorial as a response to the VVM both in the need to remember the soldiers who served in these Cold War conflicts and also in the need to correct the anticelebratory, antiheroic design of the VVM.30 These terms were neither inevitable nor universally desired. They were, however, the terms that would triumph in the struggle over the memorial design. And it is important to note that these terms did not come from the veterans.
Before 1985 there was no active national organization of Korean War veterans. In 1984 Korean War veteran Bill Norris was dismayed by the poor turnout of Korean War veterans at a Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division Association reunion and set out to connect with his fellow veterans. He had trouble generating interest at first, but his persistence led to the formation of the Korean War Veterans Association. Their modest first meeting was a memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery in July 1985. On that day each veteran carried a single mum—a flower symbolizing both sorrow and the silence of the memory of the war.31 At this meeting they produced a statement of principles for their fledgling organization: “To support the ideals this Great Country was founded on; To maintain the dignity and pride of the Korean War veterans who served this country when asked to; To work towards the recognition of those who did not return from the Korean War; To maintain and foster the comradeship between the men and women who served during the Korean War; To perpetuate the memory and reason which required our service during the Korean War.”32
This statement is straightforward and moving, especially the final principle. They were not just asking to be remembered; they were seeking to “perpetuate the memory and reason” for their service. And although they were not writing about a war memorial and did not form the organization with a war memorial in mind, they became key advocates for the memorial, and their terms for remembering the war could have been useful as the process moved forward.
THE LEGISLATION AND THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE
This brave group has been leapfrogged by time and it is up to those of us serving in Congress to rectify the situation.
REP. STAN PARRIS
In October 1985, the Ninety-Ninth Congress passed the Korean War Veterans Act authorizing $1 million for the design, planning, and construction of a Korean War memorial. This was the third time the memorial had been proposed in Congress. In 1982, Representative John Hammerschmidt sponsored “a joint resolution to authorize the erection of a memorial on public grounds in the District of Columbia, or its
