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9 “Today, We Are One People” The Family Drama of Race and Gender in Commemorative Statuary of the Vietnam War ✯ Healing, as advanced by the VVMF and other memorial planners in the 1980s, was an all-embracing response to a multifaceted phenomenon: the Vietnam “wound,” “trauma,” and “syndrome” that encompassed individual veterans’ psychological experiences and national divisions and uncertainty. These twin concepts of wounds and healing materialized in a striking number of sculptural memorials to the Vietnam War. Although the most obvious figurative representations of a war might seem to be combat scenes, statues of Americans pointing their weapons do not predominate in Vietnam War memorials. True, some memorials show infantry troops in action. For example, the statue in Nashville, Tennessee, discussed in the preceding chapter, depicts a trio of veterans, one of whom is using a radio-telephone, map and weapon in hand, while the other two, holding an M-16 rifle and a grenade launcher, stand guard. This type of sculpture, however, is not the most common. Combat or post-combat scenes usually show the results of the fighting in the form of American casualties. Some statues show Americans holding up the limp bodies of dead comrades —variants of the pose that Tom Carhart suggested for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.1 Others show Americans in uniform ministering to their comrades’ wounds—wounds that motivate the love and care of fellow soldiers and nurses. In these depictions, Americans are not the agents of violence but its victims. The war is rendered in the passive voice. The Vietnam War is not something we did; it is something that happened to us and that did things to us. Vietnam made us bleed and suffer.2 The multifigure groups in these commemorative statues attempt demographic inclusiveness. One way of seeing them is as responses to the norms of a multicultural society, in which the condensation of the nation into a single white, male figure would not do. Although this consideration certainly played a part in decisions leading to the adoption of multifigure statuary groups, the results have a broader symbolism. Gender and race become vehicles for depictions of social solidarity. These statuary 268 “Today, We Are One People” 269 groups do not celebrate pluralism but rather imagine the nation as a united family in which racial and gender differences heighten the transcendent fidelity of citizens for one another. By showing how the fellow feeling of uniformed personnel transcends these markers of social distinction, the memorial sculptures provide a template for societal reconciliation and healing. The reconciliation they dramatize is, however, deceptive because it does not address the most intractable postwar “wound,” the nation’s persistent political divisions. The vast majority of these sculptural works have been ignored by scholarship or have attracted only passing attention.3 Commemorative statuary of the Vietnam War sustains the approaches to commemoration already evident in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—a politically interested evasion of politics and strategy, a sentimental concentration on the travails of veterans, a focus on American casualties, and an emphasis on the concept of healing. Two of these approaches—a concentration on veterans and attention to the dead—although apparently at odds, were both adapted to secure public sympathy for those who fought and, by doing this, to disarm political critiques of the war. Frederick Hart tried to make as lifelike a depiction of American troops in the field as he could in his addition to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to the extent that he interviewed veterans to find out how they used and wore their equipment. This effort resulted in telling details, such as the towel loosely draped around the neck of the African American figure, the dog tag strung through the laces of one man’s boots, and the bottle of insect repellent stuck in another man’s hat band. These features lend the statue the ring of truth for those who served in Vietnam.4 As described in Chapter 4, Hart also copied items of clothing that veterans had brought back with them from the field, adding to the statue’s verisimilitude. Hart’s close attention to the specifics of the soldiers’ faces, uniforms, and equipment, however, had an unfortunate and unintended result: it brought home the absence of the many groups who are not represented in the statue. The three subjects of Hart’s statue are male infantry troops, not nurses, tank crews, gunners, engineers, supply troops, military police, airmen, or naval personnel . Members of the non...

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