in Chuck’s words, “individual squadrons, where they stayed. . .maintenance squadrons. . .where the women stayed. It represents the whole thing, so it’s not just about flying planes, it’s about keeping planes flying, all the supplies involved, all the people involved.” The finished model, we were told, would include a baseball game, dogs, people on bicycles, and letters reflecting on life on and around the airfield at the time.
Wally, Chuck, and the other volunteers see the diorama as a way of situating military machines within a place and a time, as well as a specific war. Wally explicitly said that this conflicted with the emphasis of Pima. As someone actively seeking out militarized human connections, Chuck has been collecting models of A-10 Thunderbolt II’s in his spare time, thinking that they could be used in a future project painting them, perhaps with young people. Such an event might draw Martha McSally, Republican US senator from Arizona, who flew the A-10 when she was an Air Force colonel, or the female commander of the local base, both of whom came to Pima when they launched their latest exhibit on women in flight. Wally also trained people on the A-10 during his service, so Chuck realizes there is a lot of potential for this old plane to inspire interest and excitement among commemorators, like himself.
Flight or Fight
Attempts to demilitarize the museum and foundation are not done in name only, but involve making available different ways of interpreting planes on display. Put differently, it means taking a weapon out of circulation, restoring it, and displaying it in such a way that visitors can come to appreciate alternative ideas about military objects. According to James, the way that artifacts are displayed at Pima is fairly uniform, whether or not they were used in the military, in space, or for commercial purposes. This is despite routine feedback from visitors that indicate something else is expected or desired. As he put it, “In general, the public expects the military stuff to be displayed in a more commemorative tone than the nonmilitary aircraft on display. They expect us to be a little more worshipful of people who were using these things in the war.”
James was typically this open and direct in conversation. Like many of the people interviewed for this book, James characterized himself as both insider and outsider. Many people came to the area as military personnel or as children of them. Others settled in the Southwest after growing up elsewhere in the country, but became drawn to the area around the Boneyard in one way or another. James received a master of arts degree in public history from New Mexico State University, and working at the museum was his first job out of college. He describes himself as always having been enthusiastic about aviation and aeronautics, though not wealthy enough to fly. Besides, he said, taking apart planes and finding out that commercial airliners are held together by four to six two-inch bolts, and nothing more, can put one off of flying entirely. When asked, James was quick to voice criticism of military spending, in line with the focus of chapter 1:
Obviously we need to have a military. I personally think our military wastes an awful lot of money on things that they don’t necessarily need to be spending money on. Everything wears out and gets to that point in its life, so it wasn’t necessarily a waste of money to buy those things at the time, although it kind of seems like it when you see four thousand of them just sitting in the desert. It’s more a matter of how they decide to spend money, [and] the complete dysfunction in the way the Pentagon budget is set and spent is really disheartening.
James has no military background, though around half of his volunteers and a significant number of visitors do. If there are many who expect that the museum’s staff will be dedicated to commemorating the military, loan agreements with the government state that any borrowed planes should be preserved, as James put it, “in a manner that does not produce a detriment to the image of the military.” But this stipulation allows for a wide interpretation. And this is evident in the way they restore planes and arrange their exhibits. According to James, “We’ve tried to move away from [military commemoration], but it’s a fact of how this is done. The cultural attitude of ‘the greatest generation’. . .is very ingrained, and with the events of the last fifteen years, the attitude toward veterans, anyway, has become much more respectful, perhaps overly respectful in some cases.” In effect, there is a tension within the museum between two competing approaches: one, more about war and those who fight wars, and the other a more technical history of flight itself. James expanded on this at some length:
Probably our greatest competing focus is between technological history presentation and military commemoration. . . We try to stay to the technological history side, rather than the commemoration side. There are other organizations that do commemoration and do it better than we could, so that’s not our primary focus. But a lot of people think, “Well, because you have military stuff you must be a veterans’ worship organization.” And we recognize the veterans, we respect what they’ve done, but. . .our primary focus is the technological development of aviation from balloons to outer space.
The expectation of commemoration is not just about patriotic ideas of respect for service members. Arguably, any act of reuse means reckoning not only with the pieces and materials an object is made of but also the lives they shaped and were shaped by, and the stories people tell about them, big and small. Like all reusers, the staff at ARM, Pima, and other surrounding enterprises can choose whether or not to attend to what James refers to as “the human connection” in practice, and to what extent. Because the objects they are reusing and remaking are associated with the military, their decisions and designs can have profound implications.
Let us say that you come across a military aircraft. You might reasonably wonder what branch of the military made use of it, which specific squadrons and individuals flew it, what battles it was used in, if any, and whether they were lost or won, whether anyone was killed or saved through its use, and so on. If you have insider knowledge, you might know to look at the fin flash or the squadron tail art to retrieve some of this information.11 All of these characteristics are part of its history of use and may be detected by searching for features that resemble, indicate, and/or symbolize these historical connections in particular ways. The surface of a plane might reveal traces of past skirmishes or theaters of operation. This was mentioned in an interview with Carlo McCormick, an art critic who helped curate the Boneyard Project (about which more will be said below). When you are reusing old planes and come across bullet holes, you are particularly struck by what he called the “historical resonance” of the object. This is another way of saying that what is absent stands out as much as what is present before you. In fact, what is absent stands out precisely because of what is before you: symbols denoting a military vehicle and bullet holes indicating that a battle once took place. For Carlo, the presence of these signs only amplifies what is not there, the “resonance” of a history that happened and is now over, including the actual sweating bodies and fearful voices of the plane’s former crew.12 Such present absences can be ignored, in theory, if instead you want a plane to fly again, let alone drop bombs or fire bullets. In this case, you would need to know something about aeronautics, something about its design and makeup, and something about what it has been through. To begin, you would explore the object as best you could for signs that it can still perform as desired. You would also want to store them in such a way that they could be easily found for repair and reuse.
At the Boneyard, like any scrapyard, items are differentiated according to type, with fighters and bombers grouped together. Insofar as these types can be readily interpreted as resembling one another, their resemblance affords ease of storage and access for the repair crew. There are other divisions of the space of the Boneyard that facilitate its actions as a repair-scape. One section, known as “celebrity row,” is for those planes that could potentially return to service. In a different section they store those planes that are being stripped for parts or dismantled, which will never return to service. Even if Boneyard mechanics are unable to make a plane fly again or are uninterested in doing so, it still must be kept in a state such that its parts can be harvested as needed. Everything that comes in gets washed on what is known as “the wash rack,” which every base has. Even those items in storage that may be disposed of
