by the President of the United States and two by the mayor of the District of Columbia.”45 The commission has long been made up of architects, designers, and planners with extensive cultural capital, that is, Washington’s cultural elites interested in the capital as a grand national and international stage. This commission had also vigorously supported Maya Lin’s design.
As if all these players did not sufficiently complicate the memorial process for the Mall, Congress passed the Commemorative Works Act in 1986. Congress had recently approved three full-scale memorial projects, and demand for many more was on the rise; besieged by the demand for new memorials, Congress sought to quell the memorial fever, or at least rein it in, with specific guidelines. The act stipulates that “an event or individual cannot be memorialized prior to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event or the death of the individual” and that “military monuments and memorials may only commemorate a war or similar major military conflict or a branch of the Armed Forces. . . . [M]onuments and memorials commemorating lesser conflicts or a unit of the Armed Forces are not permitted.”46 Thus, for the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the stage was set for a showdown between Reaganera military elites and Kennedy-era cultural elites. President Reagan’s twelve-member KWMAB, the Commission of Fine Arts, and the National Capital Planning Commission were required to approve a design together.
THE FIRST DESIGN
In 1988, an open design competition was held. The American Battle Monuments Commission produced, in consultation with the KWMAB, an elaborate document that specified the conditions of the competition and provided guidelines for submission, a statement of purpose, and a statement of philosophy of the memorial. Building on the language of the legislation, this statement of purpose read in part, “The memorial will express the enduring gratitude of the American people for all who took part in that conflict under our flag. It will honor those who survived no less than those who gave their lives, and will project in a most positive fashion, the spirit of service, the willingness to sacrifice and the dedication to the cause of freedom that characterized all participants.”47 Giving lives, serving, willingness to sacrifice, and dedication to freedom—this language reflects the conversation around the legislation, that service and sacrifice trump the war itself. The “cause of freedom” is as close as the language gets to specifics about the war, but “freedom” hangs as something of a free-floating signifier. Freedom for whom? Freedom from what? Freedom in what sense? Where are the specifics about freedom and this war? None of these questions are raised or addressed in the competition guidelines or the conversations that would follow about what the memorial might be.
In describing the memorial to potential designers, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) and the KWMAB included language that added an additional purpose for the memorial: “These patriotic virtues have been common to those who served their country in other times of national crisis—and must not be lacking in the instance of future emergencies. Therefore, the Memorial must radiate a message that is at once inspirational in content and timeless in meaning.” This memorial, then, was to honor the sacrifices soldiers had made and to ensure the willingness of future soldiers to give their lives in the era of the all-volunteer military. It also needed to exist out of time—to be timeless—and by implication, not be too tightly wedded to historical specificity. The statement reads like the ABMC and the KWMAB had been studying the work of Renan, Hobsbawm, and Anderson on nationalism; it requires the design to use the memory of lost soldiers to maintain the nation in particular terms. It also requires soldiers for the future. The statement ends, “The Memorial must be unique in concept, and one that will present a renewable living aspect of hope, honor, and service.”48 In a period in which the military was struggling for recruits, this language about a “renewable aspect” would have had a particular, pointed resonance.
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,
