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Between 1982 and 2004, public and private interest groups funded and built three major memorials to the soldiers of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. With a measure of incongruity they went up in reverse chronological order . Yet if advocates erect memorials partly to honor people they feel are insu;ciently venerated in the culture at large, perhaps the sequence of these three commemorations made sense.1 Vietnam veterans , believing other Americans had failed to welcome them home properly in the 1970s, applauded the appearance in 1982 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“the Wall”). In 1995 nineteen larger-than-life statues of soldiers in the Korean War went up near the Wall, forty-two years after the end of “the forgotten war.” And nearly six decades after the end of World War II, in the spring of 2004, organizers unveiled a magisterial monument to “the good war.” On the face of things, these memorials honored soldiers in strikingly di=erent ways. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial emerged from the e=orts of Jan Scruggs, a wounded Vietnam veteran who organized a private fund-raising campaign for a memorial in the late 1970s. After raising millions of dollars and successfully lobbying Congress for use of land on the national mall, Scruggs and his fellow veterans held a competition to determine the memorial’s design . Yale student Maya Lin’s winning proposal—a broad, V-shaped granite wall inscribed with the names of all those killed or missing in Vietnam— aroused sharp controversy from the beginning. Conservatives and some veterans assailed it as an overly negative “black gash of shame” in the national consciousness. Other groups, including the normally conservative American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars (vfw), supported Lin’s proposal. The controversy persisted until Secretary of the Interior James Watt and financial contributor Ross Perot, irate over the gloomy nature of the design, spearheaded a successful campaign to have three statues added to the plaza. The result, sculptor Frederick Hart’s The Three Fightingmen, featured one black, one white, and one possibly Latino gi, all of them gazing in the direction of the Wall. In time most visitors, whatever their views on the war, came to appreciate the simple commemoration of those who had perished—and to pay far more attention to the Wall itself than to the bronze figures.2 The creators of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, on the other hand, put the soldier’s likeness front and center. From its inception as Public Law 99–572 in 1986, the memorial was to honor the individuals who had served ConClusIon the฀WarrIor฀฀ Image 274 | conclusion in Korea—not just soldiers but clerks, nurses, supply sta=, chaplains, mechanics , and surgeons. Visitors to the memorial after its dedication day (July 27, 1995) encountered a large stone mural with more than two thousand etched images of such personnel beneath the inscription, “Freedom is Not Free.” But the emotional centerpiece of the monument was a procession of nineteen stainless steel figures trudging through low shrubbery, many looking fearful and tired, some looking sorrowful.3 Like gis in Korean War films of the 1950s, the statues were diverse—African American, white, Asian, Latino , and Native American. At 7'3", the figures were cast at “heroic scale,” according to the website of the Army Corps of Engineers. But this was heroism in the context of the harsh and stalemated Korean War. Like their real-life counterparts four decades earlier, the metal soldiers inspired wonder and appreciation not for their contribution to a glorious military victory, but for their fortitude under dreadful conditions. As the army corps website says of the landscape around the statues, “The juniper bushes are meant to be symbolic of the rough terrain encountered in Korea, and the granite stripes of the obstacles overcome in war.”4 Quite di=erent still was the National World War II Memorial, dedicated in May 2004. Authorized by Congress in 1993, the monument to “the good war” emerged in the thick of a national groundswell of appreciation for the “greatest generation.”5 With the ranks of World War II veterans dwindling— and amid ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversaries of Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and the end of the war in 1991, 1994, and 1995, respectively— advocates believed it was high time to pay homage to those vets’ service in America’s grandest and most successful war mobilization. Yet the memorial itself, like much wartime imagery of the early...

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