Through the Eyes of Marines

THROUGH THE EYES OF MARINES

The National Museum of the Marine Corps’ design team, through carefully crafted exhibits, summons the spirit of the nation’s military elite.

By Craig Collins

Long before he had so much as sketched out the first exhibit for the National Museum of the Marine Corps, Bill Ruggieri found himself atop the rocky volcanic dome of Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima, 650 miles south of Japan. He had been invited by the National Museum’s deputy director, Col. Joe Long (USMC-Ret.) and two of the Marine Corps’ historians, Col. John Ripley and Col. Jon Hoffman (both retired Marines), to see the place where 6,140 Marines and Navy personnel, along with nearly 22,000 Japanese defenders, were killed during the 35- day fight for the island.

Ruggieri, who was born after World War II, knew the fight for Iwo Jima’s air strips was one of the most important battles in history. He knew of the black-sand beaches, the volcanic landscape whose dominant feature was the dormant crater on the island’s southwestern tip. “But I had no idea,” he says, “that it was that small.”

Iwo Jima would be just one leg of the journey made by Ruggieri – the lead exhibit designer for the National Museum of the Marine Corps – and other members of the design team, long before ground had been broken at the site of the new museum. Together and separately, they visited the Pacific Islands of Tinian, Saipan, and Guam; they visited Belleau Wood, near Chateau-Thierry, France, where Marines fought the bloodiest and fiercest battle of World War I and earned the nickname “Devil Dogs” from their German opponents; they stayed for several days in a troop-berthing aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, offshore from Camp Lejeune, N.C.; and they visited several other military museums around the world.

According to Long, they also experienced a bit of what he went through at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in 1966: boot camp. When Ruggieri’s company, the Boston-based Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, joined the Denver architectural firm of Fentress Bradburn as the main design contractors for the museum, Long says, “The Commandant [Gen. James L. Jones, now NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe] said ‘Let’s see if we can make these guys green,’ and I thought that was a great idea. We wanted them to be as close to the Corps as they could get.”

In San Diego, design team members jumped off a bus with two dozen recruits and ran smack into a classic drillinstructor welcome, which Long recalls with unconcealed fondness. “Chris Chadbourne – he’s 55, probably, and doesn’t need to do the kind of stuff he did, but he got on the bus. And boy, they got screamed off the bus. The drill instructor was screaming at them to line up on the yellow footprints, and my guys jumped off the bus along with all those 18-, 19-year-old recruits, and Chris Chadbourne didn’t go far enough down the line of yellow footprints – he was supposed to go down to the very end – and the drill instructor got right in his face and screamed him down to the end. Actually,” he laughs, “the guys were kind of quivering a little bit.”

Ruggieri – who would become perhaps the only museum exhibit designer ever to knock himself unconscious on a Marine boot camp obstacle course – remembers his experience with a mixture of emotions. His visit to Iwo Jima moved him profoundly.

Jon Hoffman, former deputy director of the Marine Corps’ History and Museums Division, explains that immersing the design team in Marine Corps culture was an important first step toward answering a rhetorical question posed by Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak nearly a halfcentury ago: “Why do we need a Marine Corps?” By implication, the question for the design team was: “Why do we need a Marine Corps Museum?”

“Because when you really get down to it, the Marine Corps is essentially like a second army,” Hoffman says. “We’re guys who fight on the ground ... and so my view as to the museum was that this should explain to the American public what the Marine Corps contributes that nobody else has, and why we should keep the Marine Corps around.”

A Core Message

When they first began seeking designers for the National Museum several years ago, the two key organizations in the planning of the museum – the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit organization that promotes historical scholarship about the Corps, and the Marine Corps’ own History and Museums Division – began by knowing exactly what they did not want the museum to be. Since World War II, the History and Museums Division’s remarkable archive – approximately 30,000 artifacts, including the finest small-arms collection in the world; authentic combat film footage; a collection of combat art; documents; and cherished items associated with the heroic acts of individual Marines – had been scattered among several installations nationwide, including the Marine Corps Museum at the Washington Navy Yard and the Air- Ground Museum on the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va.

The cold, dark, Toktong Pass exhibit. With sound and light effects as well as a lowered temperature in the darkened room, visitors will get a strong impression of what Marines experienced during the Chosin Reservoir campaign.

All photos Larry S. Glenn

In 1999, when the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation formally launched its campaign in support of a Marine Corps Heritage Center that would be anchored by a National Museum, Hoffman says everyone involved wanted to avoid making the new museum into merely a larger warehouse stuffed full of Marine Corps treasures. Early debates over what the museum should be were conducted among members of the Heritage Foundation and historians such as Hoffman, Ripley, and Col. Joseph Alexander (USMC-Ret.), one of the Corps’ most esteemed living historians and author or co-author of nearly a dozen books, including A Fellowship of Valor: The Battle History of the U.S. Marine Corps. Alexander gives much of the credit for the final vision of the museum to the late Col. Jerry Thomas (USMC- Ret.), a member of the Heritage Foundation. “To me he was the visionary,” says Alexander. “He, more than anybody, was responsible for leading us out of what we have now – just the standard collection of stuff – into capturing more of what we would hope to be the unique culture of the Marines.”

In Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, whose previous work has included dynamic three-dimensional exhibits for such clients as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Hershey Museum, and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Marine Corps visionaries such as Hoffman and Thomas found a group of designers who understood the rare opportunity presented by a National Museum of the Marine Corps. “A friend of mine once said museums are made up of factoids, just little paragraphs that tell you facts that you needed to know to pass a history exam,” says the firm’s founding partner, Christopher Chadbourne. “We felt that what had happened with museums is that they had forgotten the art of storytelling, and that like a good teacher, you have to weave the facts into a good story and do it entertainingly. And so our exhibits ... tend to be story-based.”

Before the first exhibit was designed, Chadbourne sat down with Alexander and Hoffman to figure out the most important lessons to be learned by the story of the United States Marine Corps. First, they focused on a “Core Message,” or the single point a visitor should grasp and retain. They settled on a succinct answer to Krulak’s long-ago question: “The Marines Corps provides a vital contribution to the nation and the preservation of freedom.” They then drafted a list of nine “Primary Messages” that would guide how exhibits were designed and organized.

One of the clearest examples of this message-driven exhibit today occupies the museum’s most striking space, the Leatherneck Gallery, in which several aircraft are suspended within the soaring glass vault of the central chamber. “We created the goal,” says Hoffman, “that everything in the central gallery would highlight a significant contribution of the Marine Corps, not in terms of fighting, but in terms of the more intellectual aspect, in terms of developing doctrine. So when you come in there, you won’t just see neat things. You would say, ‘Oh, the Marine Corps weren’t just tough guys who knew how to fight. They came up with new ways to fight, and showed other people how to do that.”

There are six large artifacts in the Leatherneck Gallery. Two of them anchor tableau exhibits on the floor: an LVT “Alligator” landing craft breaching a coconut-log wall at Tarawa in November 1943 while cast figures of Marines climb over by hand; and an HRS-1 Sikorsky helicopter unloading a Marine machine gun team atop Hill 880 in West Central Korea during Operation Summit, 1950. Four are aircraft that hang from the glass curtain of the gallery: two Corsairs, an AV-8B Harrier II jet, and a Curtiss JN-4HG “Jenny” biplane.

Each of these signature artifacts is a concrete illustration of one of the Primary Messages drafted by Chadbourne, Hoffman, and Alexander: “The Marines’ traditions of rapid deployment and assault from the sea demand constant innovation.” The Curtiss “Jenny” biplane was used by Marine aviators during World War I and the “Banana Wars” of the early 20th century to refine and perfect the tactic of “dive-bombing” to provide more precise air support of combat troops. The powerful bentwing Corsair – initially rejected by the U.S. Navy because it was deemed unsuitable for use on aircraft carriers – was adopted by Marine aviators and became a lethal ground attack fighter-bomber in World War II and Korea. The vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of the revolutionary Harrier “jump jet” were ideal for the Marine Corps’ needs. The floor tableau of Tarawa illustrates the Marine Corps’ first major test of its doctrine of amphibious assault from the sea against a heavily defended beach – using an innovatively redesigned logistic support vehicle – and the Sikorsky helicopter demonstrates the new dimension the Marines added in the mobility of assault troops and logistical resupply.

In this exhibit, an early World War II Marine machine gunner fires at enemy planes with his water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun, representing the desperate early months of the war when Japanese planes seemed to fill the skies above Marine island outposts.

Ken Smith-Christmas, the former curator of material history at the Corps’ Air-Ground Museum in Quantico for more than 25 years before it closed in anticipation of the Heritage Center, was a key contributor to the design of the National Museum’s exhibits. The signature artifacts of the central gallery were one of the very first ideas to be discussed, he says. “This was a concept actually suggested by our former commandant, Gen. Mundy, in one of our planning sessions, that the visitor take away five major contributions of the Marine Corps to American military warfighting – amphibious warfare, use of helicopters, vertical takeoff and landing, close air support, and dive-bombing. These are the five biggies that we could represent using major artifacts in a huge atrium, where you just weren’t hanging up a bunch of airplanes because it’s the only place you have to hang airplanes. Each one of these has its own story to tell. And if that’s the only part of the museum you see, you come away with an understanding of why we have a Marine Corps, and what it’s done over the years.”

A Museum for Everyone

The idea that someone would visit the National Museum of the Marine Corps and visit only the central Leatherneck Gallery, without viewing any of the museum’s other exhibits, is a curious suggestion to anyone with even a passing interest in the Marine Corps. But it’s not entirely farfetched. An early marketing study, performed by a local university professor, indicated that the very characteristics that make the site of the Marine Corps Heritage Center so attractive – its location on the Interstate 95 corridor, one of the busiest tourism corridors in the United States; its free admission; and its iconic architectural design – make it more likely to be visited by people who know very little, or perhaps nothing at all, about the Marine Corps. Of the half-million visitors who are expected to visit the museum each year, it’s likely that 70 percent will have no direct connection to the Corps. “And so if you start in a gallery by describing what the Marines did during the Barbary Wars,” says Chadbourne, “you’ve already lost the 70 percent of the people who don’t have a clue what the Barbary Wars were.”

As a Marine historian, Alexander’s post-military career has consisted of writing books and making appearances on television’s History Channel to relate the stories of the Corps to both military and civilian audiences of varying levels of knowledge and interest. But even he, in his role as author of virtually every exhibit panel that appears in the National Museum of the Marine Corps, was not prepared for the range of visitors that Chadbourne and Associates hoped to entertain and educate. “Chris divides any museum’s visitors into three categories,” says Alexander. “First, the Streakers, who come and go, who are in and out in a half hour, just skimming the surface. Then you’ve got the Strollers, who may come and stop and pause and read and ponder, but aren’t really that into it. And then the Students, who come and may stay forever – and may stay forever in one section of one gallery, because they want to know everything they can about it. It’s hard to appeal to all three, obviously.” He offers this example: “If I’m writing the exhibit panels for the Vietnam War, I can’t assume that the people coming in know what an NVA is or what a ChiCom grenade is, or what a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle was, or what the Gulf of Tonkin was, what McNamara’s Wall or what Tet was, or even what the whole war was about. This is where Christopher Chadbourne has been particularly effective.”

A Marine machine gun team deploys from a Sikorsky HRS-1 helicopter in the Korean War tableau located in Leatherneck Gallery. The Korean conflict marked the Marines’ pioneering use of helicopters on the battlefield.

It isn’t just the nature of the exhibits themselves, but also the physical layout of the museum that appeals to each of these three groups – and attempts to convert every visitor, at every turn, into a Student. The hub of the museum’s circular structure, the Leatherneck Gallery, while built to appeal to all three groups, is a classic and flashy appeal to Streakers. It is ringed by a fast-track pathway known as the Legacy Walk, a timeline printed on the wall and illustrated by cased artifacts and other visuals that allow visitors to correlate Marine Corps activities and events with their context in American and world history – a feature, says Alexander, designed for Strollers. “Here you’re seeing that the United States, for example, in the late 19th century, became an imperial nation and was in pursuit of overseas markets and possessions along with the other European powers, and got us into a war with Spain over the perceived outrages in the Spanish colony of Cuba. And so you’ll say, ‘Okay, here are the Marines going into Gitmo Bay.’ Now you know a little bit more of why this happened, how we ended up going to Guam, going to the Philippines. You get a sense of the Marines being the storm petrel, the fire brigade, priding themselves on their ‘First to Fight’ readiness, their quick deployability.”

At the appropriate point along the Legacy Walk, visitors may enter one of the three “era galleries” that exist today: Uncommon Valor, 1940-1945; Send in the Marines, 1946-1954; and Land, Air, and Sea, 1955-1974. “World War II, Korea, and Vietnam,” says Smith- Christmas, “we selected those because they represent the generations that are dying off now. The guys that served before then aren’t with us any more, and the guys – and ladies – who’ve served since then, we’re going to keep moving to cover their periods of Marine Corps history as well.” Ultimately, nine era galleries are planned for the museum.

The era galleries are the museum’s main organizing features, and their exhibits – a mix of immersive multimedia environments, tableaus, static written panels, and cased displays – are designed to appeal to all types of visitors and learning styles. They are also the rooms that will house the relics of Marine lore, some of which – like the large flag raised at Iwo Jima and famously captured on film by Joe Rosenthal – are likely to be familiar to non-Marines, and other iconic items which, while probably unknown to the casual visitor, have an almost spiritual significance for Marines: Capt. Stephen Pless’s Huey helicopter; John Lejeune’s map case; Smedley Butler’s swagger stick; John Quick’s sword; Dan Daly’s Medals of Honor. The era galleries will make it clear that the design team, while making Marine Corps history available to the broadest range of visitors possible, is not interested in “Marine Corps History for Dummies.” Its exhibits are meant to appeal equally to scholars such as Alexander.

“Our real goal,” says Smith-Christmas, “was to make everybody feel, when they come through the museum, that we designed it with them in mind. That’s everybody from the thoroughly disinterested spouse who would rather be – like my wife – going to a nice historical garden someplace and not surrounded by tanks and airplanes, to the nitpicking canteen cork collector. ... No matter how much time you spend in there, you come away with a complete story. It might not be as detailed as others, but at least it’s complete from A to Z – and every visitor will understand the debt that we all owe to the Marine Corps.”

From the Yellow Footprints to Hill 881 South

It should also be clear to visitors that the design team’s goal was to tell the story of the Marine Corps through the experiences and voices of individual Marines. Visitors who venture beyond the Leatherneck Gallery may enter the museum’s orientation theater, the Scuttlebutt Theater, for a brief introductory film about the Corps, narrated by more than a dozen Marines of varying ages and ranks. From this theater, visitors will encounter Making Marines, the first of several immersive exhibits that will allow them to experience, to the fullest extent possible, what it’s like to be a Marine. They’ll visit a virtual “boot camp,” where they’ll step into a kiosk and place their feet in the yellow footprints familiar to every Marine, while a virtual drill instructor offers the new “recruits” a vociferous demonstration and some insight into how a group of diverse young Americans are transformed into disciplined and unified comrades-in-arms.

For Alexander, the desire to tell the Marine Corps’ story in the first person – as opposed to the detached monotone of the history professor – was an idea that struck the museum’s proponents in their earliest discussions, before the design team had been selected. “We got into some of the more personal side of it, and how we intended to use this to tell the story, not just of the generals and colonels, of which there were many in the room, but of the troops,” Alexander says. “It was really their story. And a man named Eugene Sledge had just died that year. He was a great PFC who had written the definitive account of World War II called With the Old Breed. It’s still in print. And a lot of people have compared it to All Quiet on the Western Front from World War I, also The Red Badge of Courage from the Civil War – an enlisted man’s account of two horrific battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. He was a survivor of both of them. And we proposed that the museum would be not just the big picture of the battles and the great generals and such, but to have people like this youngster who actually did more to win the battle, I think, than any of us ever did, and had the heart to come home and then try to expunge these ghosts from his past and also to tell the story of his buddies who didn’t come back – and did so terrifically.”

An oil-stained gunner aims his Lewis gun from the rear cockpit of the National Museum of the Marine Corps’ JN-4HG Jenny.

A retired CH-46 Sea Knight was cut in two so that the rear half could be used as the entrance to the Vietnam-era Hill 881-S exhibit. The helicopter is painted in the colors of HMM-364 Purple Foxes.

A mural depicts the commanding view from Hill 881-S, and details such as the correct bootprints in the red clay soil, or the flattened tire of the howitzer, add to the experience.

With members of the design team, Alexander set about making the voices of Marines such as Sledge available throughout the exhibits. The galleries feature several audio and video stations where visitors can plug in and hear firstperson accounts not only of battles, but of everyday life in the Marine Corps. All of these audio and video presentations were produced by Batwin & Robin Productions of New York. Says Robin Silvestri, the company’s co-principal, “I think the thing that was most interesting for all of us – meaning all of us here at Batwin and Robin – is that everything was created from a first-person point of view. Even within the straight video-monitor, documentary kind of pieces that we produced, we did a lot of research with Col. Alexander and a researcher by the name of Beth Crumley [currently the assistant curator in the museum] on finding first-person accounts, whether they were written in books or whether they were audio recordings, and we used firstperson as much as possible. ... To me that was the most interesting part of it, because it wasn’t just straight old history. It was told in the voice of the Marines.”

The design team’s desire for first-person perspectives at the National Museum was so powerful, in fact, that each of the era galleries is anchored by a multisensory immersive exhibit, such as the boot camp experience, that will allow visitors to feel as if they are part of a key event in Marine Corps history. Given two eventful centuries, a non-Marine might have difficulty deciding which events would receive this level of treatment. But there is a surprising – if not universal – consensus among most Marines, one that Alexander says is shared by Commandant Michael W. Hagee. “He has the view,” says Alexander, “that the three greatest battles – and this is a way to start a fight in any club in the Marine Corps – are what I’ve called, in a previous publication, the touchstones. “They are Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, and the Chosin Reservoir [in Korea, where a small number of vastly outnumbered Marines fought their way from the Chosin Reservoir south to Hungnam in subzero weather]. The Vietnam gallery will also feature an immersive exhibit emblematic of the Marine experience in Vietnam: a hot landing zone at Hill 881 South, near the combat base at Khe Sanh.

Alexander speaks of the immersive exhibits with great enthusiasm. “The classic example of the immersion gallery, I think, is in Korea,” he says. “When you walk into that exhibit, the temperature drops. And you feel the wind in your face. ... And you can make out the huddled figures of Marines in a very thin line defending a hilltop at Fox Pass. It was very much like Thermopylae: There are not enough of them, they’ve been hit night after night, they don’t know how long they can hold out, but they’ve got to because there are two whole regiments up at the other end of the road, 20 miles away, and the only way they can ever get out is along that road. And you step into that and environmentally sense the cold, the loneliness, the fear, the fortitude, and the dread, because it’s night and the Communists are coming. ... You hear the telltale signals that the Marines have learned, the bugles blaring and the cymbals crashing and the flares and the yells and the screams, and somewhere out there in the night, through the snow, are a thousand Chinese with their burp guns, running. ... You’ll walk out of that with a sense of, ‘My gosh, whoever they were, the men who fought in the Chosin Reservoir have seen their touch of a cold hell.’”

The immersive exhibits – including the Iwo Jima immersion, in which visitors step from an amphibious landing craft onto a black beach, wrapped by a 270- degree projection of actual film footage of incoming enemy fire from the ramparts and caves of Iwo Jima – are meant to help visitors imagine. But nobody on the team believes, or desires, that visitors will feel what the Marines felt at Chosin or Iwo Jima. The only ones who can convey that, of course, are Marines themselves, and they do this movingly in the introductory film produced by Batwin & Robin for the Scuttlebutt Theater. In the film, says Silvestri, “We interviewed everyone from (former Marine) Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) down to Sgt. Wright, who is a young Marine in his 30s who had both his arms blown off in Iraq. And they tell the story of what it means to be a Marine, and that is among the most moving pieces we’ve done. And I’m happy to say that Col. Alexander has shown it to a few of his old buddies and he said it’s brought tears to these old dogs’ eyes.”

Alexander himself – a prolific and gifted military historian – almost seems at a loss for words when pressed to describe what it means to be a Marine. “We’re not a maudlin type,” he says, preferring to point to a concrete example he often finds on cars in the parking lots of shopping malls, churches, and watering holes in his hometown of Asheville, N.C.: United States Marine Corps bumper stickers and rear-window emblems of every type. “They’re everywhere,” he says, “which indicates of course the presence of a lot of Marines of some stripe, and also the fact that this persists, that most of these guys who put in their time, some of them 30 years – whatever it is, they gave their all, and they were proud of it, and are still proud of it.” If you’re not a Marine, the only way you might come close to understanding why is to visit the National Museum of the Marine Corps.