Embattled Memories: Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials

Chapter 4: “Mythologizing” Memories: A Critique of the Utah Korean War Memorial

72 c h a p t e r 4 “Mythologizing” Memories A Critique of the Utah Korean War Memorial It was serendipitous that I came upon the Utah Korean War Memorial in the summer of 2006. As a newcomer to Utah, I had been randomly exploring the historic sites of Salt Lake City. One day I found a site called Memory Grove Park in the vicinity of downtown. The park was impressively serene, with well-maintained vegetation and historic decor. I would have been just one of the many mindless strollers if I hadn’t accidentally found a V-shaped, somewhat gaudy and fresh-looking memorial that stood out against the archaic backdrop of the park. To my surprise, this nascent mnemonic object was dedicated to the Korean War. At first sight, as one who had originally come from the Korean Peninsula, where the memories of the Korean War are far from consensual or stagnant, I immediately experienced an affinity for the memorial. Soon after I commenced a case study of this memorial, I learned that the Utah Korean War Memorial—unlike the national memorials on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.—did not have its own official records of birth history ; with the exception of a couple of articles in local newspapers,few written “ m y t h o l o g i z i n g ” m e m o r i e s 73 documents about it existed. To trace the memorial’s unnoted history, I therefore began to track down the people who had been involved in the construction of the memorial, including veterans, a designer, and a city officer.1 They provided me with compelling testimonies as well as invaluable memorabilia (notes, drawings, photos, letters, and so forth), all of which greatly sensitized me to the meanings of the memorial in the specific context of the space and time of its construction. The Utah Korean War Memorial came to exist in 2003 when the United States unprecedentedly boosted American memories of the Korean War at its fiftieth anniversary.2 The passage of fifty years had transformed the young soldiers who had gone to the battlefield in their late teens and early twenties into old veterans who lived their daily lives with a heightened sense of the brevity of the human life span. Thus, the timing of the fiftieth anniversary seemed to effectively mobilize veterans to participate in commemorative events at local sites.Many joined in the building of memorials in their home cities across the United States, including Wichita, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and so forth. Echoing the nation’s belated memory boom of the forgotten war, Utah Korean War veterans in 2003 erected a memorial at Salt Lake City’s Memory Grove Park, one of the region’s most respected secular commemorative sites. Local commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War, encouraged by the U.S. Department of Defense during the years from 2000 through 2003, provided Korean War veterans with a rare opportunity to attempt to make their memories comprehensible to the public. Given the context of the U.S. collective memories of the Korean War, in which forgetting supersedes remembering, local veterans seem to have long yearned for public attention to be focused on their sacrifices on the unknown battlefields of Korea. Korean War veterans thus seem particularly vulnerable to the process of depoliticizing memories. In this milieu, the present case study of the Utah Korean War Memorial provides an analytical lens through which the audience is able to critically appreciate the broader phenomenon of memorialization of the Korean War that has recently taken place in towns and cities across the United States, reflecting in particular America’s commemorative spirit for the war’s fiftieth anniversary. More specifically, Utah’s memorial resonates with three mythical scripts—resilience, local pride, and the good war—that emerged 74 e m b at t l e d m e m o r i e s from both local and national contexts of remembering. This case study reveals how such scripts have allowed veterans to negotiate tensions between the individual memories that evolved from their firsthand experiences of the war and the official narratives that emerged from the U.S. collective memories of the Korean War; this research also explores how the official commemoration of the war has shifted local veterans’ rhetorical positions from those of potentially subversive witnesses of the peculiar...