they reach a stalemate. The proposed design echoed elements of both the Duncan photograph and the memories of veterans of the walking war.
The black-and-white photograph of soldiers walking a dirt road through a deep valley is fascinating. The soldiers, in the foreground, are walking toward the camera on a dusty white road. The thin dotted black line they form on the road immediately draws the eye. More soldiers are standing and sitting by jeeps on the side of the road, also looking at the moving line of soldiers and emphasizing the centrality of the line. But the background of the photograph—the dark, looming mountain range—also draws the eye. A striking landscape of black and gray mountains under building gray clouds competes with the line of soldiers for the viewer’s attention. The tension between foreground and background and the relative emptiness of the middle ground seem to speak to the problems of remembering the soldier rather than the war; the soldier is literally foregrounded in bold terms, and the photograph, as a result, seems hollowed out, empty despite its dramatic elements.
There is, however, an important distinction between the way the photograph represents the soldiers and the way the design proposed to represent them. In the photograph, the figures are foregrounded, but they are also tiny, dwarfed by the dramatic landscape. In the memorial design, the scale is reversed. In fact, the scale of the design bordered on the outrageous: thirty-eight figures, nine feet tall, 350 feet long. This scale made the soldiers literally monumental, ensuring that they would dominate the landscape of Ash Woods and shift the focus away from anything beyond their presence. Depicting the soldiers as bigger than the landscape through which they move has serious implications: it represents them as bigger than what they were doing in the world.
This is what enabled designer John Paul Lucas to tell the press that “patriotism is the primary narrative theme of the memorial.” He added, “We hope that visitors will be stimulated by the symbolism to think about the nature of the war itself.”58 It is significant that, for him, patriotism came first, then the nature of the war. And it is perhaps more significant that he speaks of the nature of the war in terms of the experience of the individual soldier—this is what this war felt like. Lucas and his fellow designers did not take up questions about why the war was waged or what it meant or what the outcome was. The designers, working within the perimeters of the design competition, were interested in the specificity of the experience of the soldier. A specific memory of the war, as they understood it, was a memory of what it felt like for the soldier rather than what it did in the world. If they had embraced Duncan’s scale, they would have created a very different sense of what the war felt like; figuring the soldiers as dramatically oversized is a powerful shift away from the photograph and the war.
The symbolic vocabulary used by Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas, and Pennypacker Oberholtzen is at once literal and oblique. The design contest did not explicitly require figures of soldiers, but it would be hard to satisfy the contest’s explicit stipulations—and nearly impossible to meet the implied requirements around celebrating heroism and honoring soldiers—without representing them. The Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas, Pennypacker Oberholtzen design used thirty-eight soldiers because the line between the North Korea and South Korea held at the thirty-eighth parallel and the war lasted thirtyeight months. This makes sense in a very literal way but also requires that the soldier’s bodies serve not to represent soldier’s bodies so much as lines on a map and days on a calendar. This seems especially problematic when the strong desire to remember a heroic war runs up against the realities of a stalemate that has lasted more than fifty years. The looming bodies of the soldiers are refigured as markers of how long it took them not to win, or as markers of a line that has been wrapped in barbed wire for fifty years, a demilitarized zone long devoid of any human presence. Does it work against the rhetoric of foregrounding the soldiers and their sacrifices to use the figures in this way? Certainly it complicates the figure of the soldier in the proposed memorial; it dehumanizes them even as it sacralizes them.
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
