The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Place of honor
Museum offers a look at stories, sacrifices, tragedies, triumphs.
National Museum of the Marine Corps offers look at stories, sacrifices, tragedies, triumphs,
Michael D. Fay, a retired Marine in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, is still haunted by that cold November day in 2005 when his platoon rushed into a building to pull out dead and injured colleagues who had been ambushed in a firefight in Old Ubaydi, Iraq.
The building, which he calls the death house, had been boobytrapped with spider holes, from which Iraqi militants fired AK-47s, leaving six Marines dead and 11 wounded. For Fay, a gunnery sergeant who had trained with the squad that was ambushed and had been transferred to a different platoon only the night before, the scene was heart-wrenching.
“There were bodies everywhere,” he said. “I had seen stuff like this before, but not with people that I had literally slept with and ate with. I still have chronic PTSD.”
To deal with the anguish of combat, Fay turned to art, snapping photos and painting those scenes to remember and pay tribute to the fallen Marines. Today, some of Fay’s paintings hang in the Combat Art Gallery, part of a new wing added last year to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, adjacent to the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia.
The two-floor museum opened in 2006, giving visitors a feel for the sights and sounds behind the Marine Corps as far back as 1775, when it was first formed as a branch of the infantry known as the Continental Marines, to Vietnam.
More new galleries are scheduled to open over the next four years, including ones that focus on Marines who served in conflicts after Vietnam, including in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as galleries that pay tribute to Medal of Honor recipients and Marine sports heroes.
Fay, who served in the Gulf War of 1991 as well as in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq and Afghanistan, is among 22 Marines whose art graces the combat gallery’s walls.
Often, Americans hear about conflicts around the globe and know that Americans are serving, but don’t relate to the people behind the uniforms.
“There’s a general disconnect,” said Charles Grow, deputy director of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, a career Marine and combat artist. “A lot of people just don’t identify with it; they don’t have a brother or father or cousin or mom in the military, so it becomes more abstract.”
The museum helps visitors connect by offering a raw look at Marines’ stories, sacrifices, disappointments, tragedies and triumphs.
“It humanizes them,” said Robert Blackman, a retired Marine lieutenant general who is president and chief executive of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, which oversees the museum’s programs and direction.
Political debates about Syria and the rising North Korean threat have increased interest in the Marines and military service in recent years. The museum attracted about 470,000 visitors in 2017 — its highest level in five years, according to Lin Ezell, the museum’s director.
The museum is divided into several sections. Some focus on specific events, like World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Others use vignettes, images and sound to showcase the training, psyche and experiences of those in combat.
The Leatherneck Gallery features testimonials, artifacts and images, with various fighter jets suspended overhead.
The Making Marines section tracks how the Marine Corps transforms average citizens into elite warriors. “You hear their thoughts about what’s going to happen to them and what’s motivated them to go,” Ezell said.
The museum offers an immersive experience, where visitors can see and feel Marine life. Visitors can, for example, step into a booth, where they will hear a drill instructor bark orders at them as if they were new recruits.
The Vietnam section features a replica of a punji booby-trap pit, and in the World War II exhibit, the room shakes as a giant video screen shows what the Marines saw and heard as they stormed the beaches.
Visitors can also see and feel the fully loaded backpacks Marines had to lug around, and test their gun skills at the M-16 Laser Rifle Range.
The newest sections — the Combat Art Gallery, the Medal of Honor Theater and the Children’s Gallery — were added in 2017.
The Medal of Honor Theater plays a 38-minute film, “We, the Marines,” that follows Marines through recruitment, training, combat and homecoming. It is presented on a 72-foot-by-54-foot screen, and narrated by Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, who is a former Marine himself.
The Children’s Gallery is the most interactive, allowing youngsters to climb into a World War I foxhole, paint their faces with camouflage paint, try on uniforms and sit at the controls of a scaleddown Korean War-era helicopter.
But it is the Combat Art Gallery that gives visitors a glimpse at Marines’ emotional psyche.
“The art depicts the experiences of Marines in ways that can’t be captured either through newspaper reporting or through video because the artist brings the emotion out in the art,” Blackman said.
One of the more touching watercolors is Fay’s “Lance Corporal Fuller Mourns,” which features a young Marine with tears streaming down his cheeks with his fallen comrades lying in the background. The painting was Fay’s tribute to his colleagues who lost their lives in that November 2005 ambush in Iraq. “This piece was cathartic,” he said.
Another painting, Sarah Rothschild’s “What Happens There Doesn’t Always Stay There,” is a gripping self-portrait of a woman draped in an American flag with mascara-run tears streaking her distressed face as she stares at 21 bullets lined up on the ground in front of her. Rothschild spent a year in Iraq and seven months in Afghanistan.
“It’s a haunting portrayal,” said Joan Thomas, senior art curator at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.
Some of the Marine artists were specifically sent to hot zones to sketch and paint what they saw. Others began painting as a therapeutic way to deal with invisible scars they incurred in the battlefield.
“We paint to reach people emotionally as well as intellectually,” said Kris Battles, a combat artist who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and now lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Rob Bates, a combat artist who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan as a Marine rifleman and one as a combat artist, added, “It’s fulfilling — I feel like I’m remembering them so they’re not forgotten.”
Some people wrongly think the museum’s art is a propaganda tool that glorifies and promotes war, Blackman said. “There is nothing glorious about getting shot at or somebody trying to kill you, but there is a price to it,” he said. “And it’s important for Americans to better understand what that price is.”