Sacrifices of military honored in Jacksonville
As 2024 begins with Ukraine and Gaza still ravaged by armed combat, a display at Jacksonville Museum of Military History puts a human face on the statement attributed to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman: “War is hell.”
The exhibit, which visitors face as they enter, echoes the museum’s mission statement “to foster an appreciation for the sacrifices made by local men and women defending our country both on and off the battlefield.”
Shaped like a map of the Natural State, the wall-size memorial lists alphabetically the 596 Arkansans who died in the Vietnam War during the 1960s and ’70s. Arrayed overhead are 596 military dog tags, each representing one of those lost. They hang like teardrops. The explanatory text is brief, letting the names speak for themselves.
The museum, among the best of its kind in the state, covers Arkansans’ roles in conflicts going back to the Civil War. It includes affected civilians as well as members of the armed forces. Among recent additions is material from the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, along with the U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan.
A memorial outside the museum, located on the World War II site of the Arkansas Ordnance Plant, bears the names of 53 workmen killed on Aug. 9, 1965, when fire and toxic smoke engulfed a Titan II missile silo being renovated near Searcy.
Inside, video clips revisit that tragedy. Compelling footage includes interviews with the only two survivors. Other videos recount the Titan silo explosion near Damascus on Sept. 19, 1980, that killed one worker and ejected a thermonuclear warhead. The
H-bomb’s safety checks kept it from detonating and devastating Central Arkansas.
Displayed nearby is the museum’s most fearsome object, a red-tipped Titan II missile re-entry cone. It is pointed out that the warhead inside the cone weighed 8,900 pounds and was the largest nuclear weapon ever deployed in an ICBM. Packing 9 megatons, the bomb was 600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Its destructive radius would have extended from Damascus almost to North Little Rock.
Some of the most fascinating exhibits date to World War II. A good many feature women, reflecting the fact that they numbered 70% of the 14,000 employees at the Arkansas Ordnance Plant, which made detonators and relays for artillery shells.
One poster shows three female workers, identified as “Soldiers Without Guns.” Another pictures a woman at work with a soldier in the background. The headline reads: “The Girl He Left Behind Is Still Behind Him … She’s a WOW — Woman Ordnance Worker.”
A poignant display, installed in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Normandy D-Day landings, honors seven Arkansas who took part in the invasion. Five of them did not survive the combat of June 6, 1944. Four of them were enlisted men, while the fifth was Maj. George S. Grant of the 101st Airborne Division. He came from Prairie Township in Washington County.
There’s no specific Arkansas connection to the artwork hanging near the map listing the state’s Vietnam War fatalities. But the copies of Norman Rockwell posters illustrating the Four Freedoms cited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt still speak to American ideals, however challenged they may be by 21st-century realities.
Rockwell’s family scenes, printed in 1943 in the Saturday Evening Post magazine, stand for Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom From Want and Freedom From Fear.
U.S. military forces, when properly deployed, have played a key role in helping support those aspirations for more than two centuries. As museum exhibits make clear, Arkansans have done their part.