Only in America. Matt Frei
over to the new World War II memorial, which is an unabashed celebration of the war that secured America’s dominance on the international stage. Gurgling fountains veil heroic quotations about the struggle for freedom. Every state is represented by a square granite column, festooned with copper wreaths. There are 4014 gold stars, each representing a hundred fallen soldiers, and two giant arches commemorating the victories in the Pacific and the Atlantic. For a monument that celebrates America’s victory over fascism it has an oddly square-jawed appearance. It’s as if Albert Speer had been asked to redesign Stonehenge.
The sheer number of war memorials is surprising. There are an astonishing 246 in Washington. Anyone who has ever led a battle charge is commemorated on a plinth somewhere in the city. They range from the puny bronze of Colonel Blassier, the commander of the 3rd Iowa Rifles, standing to attention like a stranded tourist looking for directions, to the extraordinarily tasteless ‘Flaming Sword’ near the White House. A seventeen-foot-high frilly phallus, covered in gold plate and clutched by two interlocking hands, it celebrates the sacrifices of the US Second Army Division in World War I. Stylistically it belongs to the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein. The uncanny thing about these war memorials is that many of them reflect the nature of the conflicts they commemorate. The World War II monument is unambiguously triumphant and celebrates a conflict that changed the rest of the world. The famous Vietnam Memorial is a stark black granite wall. This sombre slab bears the names of the fallen – all 56,400 of them – and forces you to remember a war that cowed America and gave birth to a syndrome. Even the students from Arkansas, exhausted by thoughts of sacrifice and nobility, were stunned into reverential silence as they ran their fingers over some of the engraved names. At first they didn’t even notice the bearded amputee who manoeuvred his wheelchair next to the shiny wall and rested his hand on a group of names. He sobbed quietly, oblivious to the other visitors, lost in the memories of some distant battle. When they did notice him many of the students looked embarrassed and walked away. Mr Wyeth was lost for words. Perhaps out of respect. Perhaps because Vietnam was a war that most Americans would rather forget. It strayed from the heroic narrative of the country’s other conflicts. It served no obvious purpose. The Vietnam Memorial is simple and intimate. The shiny black granite reflects your face, pockmarked by the engraved names. It remembers a failed war that had virtually no impact on geopolitics but tortured the individuals who fought in it and the soul of the nation that sent them there. It is a black slab devoid of heroism, bleating with introspection.
It stands in stark contrast to the Korean War Memorial which features life-sized soldiers traipsing up a mountain in the bitter Korean winter. Huddled against the freezing wind, these silvery figures look flash-frozen in a moment of history. What better monument to remind people of a largely forgotten, indecisive war that ended not in victory or defeat but in an inconclusive truce. Even today America is still officially at war with North Korea. The students liked this one. Looking at the petrified men they tried to imagine what battle felt like. Again Mr Wyeth was anxious to move on. He didn’t want his charges to get worn out before they reached the apex of his tour: the Iwo Jima Memorial on the other side of the Potomac in Virginia, perhaps the most famous of them all. It displays the six Marines who hoisted the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during the Pacific war. It has inspired countless books and a Clint Eastwood movie and Mr Wyeth choked back the tears as he launched into a monologue about sacrifice and liberty. The monument, which has a commanding view over the Mall, was circled by a group of silver-haired veterans and their wives. They said nothing; one reached up to touch the cast-iron boot of a soldier.
In the distance we heard a gun salute being fired at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s only a few hundred yards away and through the trees you could see the gun carriage bearing the coffin of a fallen officer. Waiting at the graveside was an elderly lady, dressed in black, slumped in her seat, surrounded by mourners. The cemetery occupies two hundred acres of land seized by the government after the Civil War from the family of Robert E. Lee, the best-known general on the losing side. President Kennedy is buried here as well as 25,000 veterans from America’s sixty-five wars. Since 2003 a new section of graves has expanded far faster than anyone had ever imagined. The Iraq war keeps the staff at Arlington busy, including one woman who is present at every funeral and whose job it is to hand the folded flag that once covered the fallen soldier’s coffin to the presiding officer. He will then give it to the mourning mother or father. It is one of the strict rituals of the nation’s most famous cemetery and the woman who carries out this task is called ‘the Lady of Arlington’. Her black, silhouetted figure is like a symbol of grief in a medieval painting, always unobtrusive, always present.
The clatter of horses’ hooves, the haunting notes of a bugle, the wind in the trees and the muffled tears of mothers and fathers were the white noise of grief interrupted now and then by the roar of military helicopters flying between the White House and the Pentagon, the Pentagon and Quantico, the Marine base south of Washington, or just keeping an eye on the people below.
As you look down at the Mall from the Iwo Jima Memorial, past Arlington Cemetery, you take in the panorama: the square temple of the Lincoln Memorial, Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the museums, the White House, tucked away in a corner and barely visible. And somewhere to the right, out of sight but never out of mind, thanks to those helicopters, is the Pentagon. And then it strikes you. The layout of Washington, the monuments, the architecture, the quotations in marble all celebrate quintessentially unimperial notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. And yet this city feels like the imperial capital. I can imagine all the marble-clad splendour one day covered in moss, crumbling with decay. I’m keen to test this idea on Mr Wyeth, the historian. But he’s escaped just in time. He and his charges have gone. I can see them in the distance heading down the hill towards a waiting bus. The sun is beginning to set.
The war memorial that is missing from the stage is the one that hasn’t been built yet because the war it will commemorate is still being fought. If we could see how the Iraq war monument turned out we could probably guess the future of the conflict and how it affected America’s role in the world. Will it be another wall of names like its Vietnam counterpart or a man toppled from a slab? And should that man be Saddam Hussein or George Bush? And will the final result in stone be as honest as its predecessors?
Like other artificial capitals, Washington was chosen by the man after whom it is named for all the things it was not: the dot on the map next to the raging Potomac River barely amounted to a village. It would never compete with New York, Philadelphia or Boston, the obvious contenders for the crown. And most importantly the notion of a central capital simply wasn’t very important to a group of settlers and pilgrims whose very escape across the Atlantic had been motivated by a desire to get away from any form of central government. Washington was thus born under the worst possible circumstances as the necessary, unavoidable offspring of administration. It is hardly a recipe for a love affair. But as America’s power has grown, so has Washington’s. What distinguishes it from Canberra, Bonn or Brasilia is that this capital is also the custodian of the near-sacred idea that has inspired the country around it. The monuments, vaults and rituals of Washington capture the essence of how America perceives itself. They are the self-conscious windows into America’s soul. The slums of Southeast Washington, the lobby firms that have mushroomed on K Street, the vast and Orwellian bureaucracy that luxuriates on the south side of the Mall – these are the grubby flip side of a noble idea. Washington is the festering interface between America’s rhetoric and reality. It is a perfect place in which to rummage for answers.
We live on what is called a ‘no thru road’. The term ‘dead end’ is considered far too terminal. It is a quiet street flanked by a small park that looks more like a jungle set for a remake of Apocalypse Now. The street descends towards Rock Creek Park, the green belt that used to divide Washington between rich and poor, black and white. Because the angle is quite steep our road turns into an ice rink in winter and a mud slide in the summer when it rains. It is named after Samuel Tilden, the hapless Democratic candidate for the presidency who won the popular vote in 1876 but lost the electoral college to Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican. The result, oddly, hinged on the outcome of the vote in Florida.