Exhibits
10/9/06
4:54 PM
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THE MUSEUM
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
All photos Larry S. Glenn
L
ong 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 35day 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
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