by Taya Kyle
That was the easy part. Raising the $1.68 million it took to build the facility was harder. Grants were not available for an operation that small and without a permanent building. But local veterans emptied their wallets; by opening day, the building was entirely paid for.
Museums at the time tended to tell stories about battles rather than about individual soldiers. At the time, there weren’t many museums that would make service during, say, the Civil War, “real” by talking about a specific soldier, what he did before and after as well as during the battle, and how he lived. Besides his musket, the display might have his diary or pages from it, a sock darned by his mother, and so on.
Events with veterans as featured guests became a regular and popular occurrence—dances with World War II veterans, for example. Those events helped grow a community, as did more traditional programs like lectures—but even these had personal twists, with audience members who had served invited to come up and share a few memories. In many ways, the museum was as much a gathering point as anything else.
While much of the original focus was on World War II, Vietnam veterans found a particular resonance with the museum and its mission. In some cases, the programs represented a turning point in their ability to deal with the aftermath of their own war, to accept what they had been through, or to simply celebrate their time in the military. In a few cases, the museum acted as a clearing house for referrals, helping people get in touch with needed professionals. The overall message was one that honored service—not just of the men on the frontline but of everyone behind the scenes as well.
A flood in the winter of 2007–08 nearly wiped out the museum. While the building was three feet above the worst flood the town had ever experienced, it was still inundated. Flood waters—and everything associated with them, from grime to mud to debris—surged inside, filling the building with roughly a foot of water and damaging many of the holdings. The community responded—people whose homes and farms were four feet underwater left their property and spent countless hours salvaging, cleaning, and then repairing the museum, its artifacts, and the displays.
It took three months and hundreds of volunteers, but the museum reopened.
Not only has it recovered, but it continues to grow. There are displays and information on veterans from the Revolutionary War all the way up to what the museum calls “the desert wars”—Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current period, conflicts where my husband, Chris, served. Families continue to donate items and, more important, the life stories that go with them.
The current director of the museum is Chip Duncan. Chip is the son of an Air Force officer who was a nuclear engineer and a staff officer who became a computer simulations modeler—as he used to tell his son, he fought World War III forty-eight different times, trying to figure out what the proper strategy would be if there was a major conflict between superpowers during the Cold War era. Rejected from the service because of asthma, Chip trained as an architect, but as a young man he became a missionary. Somewhere in there, though, he developed a love of history, and on a visit to the Oregon area, he happened to meet a “grizzled old Marine” who told him he had to visit the museum.
His visit to the museum left him enthralled with the museum and its mission—and in tears. The stories the veterans told resonated in many ways, not least of all because of Chip’s own family history, which includes men who served all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
He met Lee and started talking. A personal tour of some of the museum’s holdings not on display led to a longer conversation, and out of the blue, Lee asked if he wanted to have his job someday.
Uh, but . . .
“I’m not ready to retire any time soon,” answered Lee. “But keep it in mind.”
Chip left with some skepticism about the offer, no doubt, as it had been made on the spur of the moment after perhaps an hour’s worth of conversation. But a few years later, when Lee contacted him out of the blue and said he was ready to retire . . . how could Chip not check it out? Besides the museum, the community was perfect—a small-town feel, but not so small that it was isolated, with Tacoma about an hour to the north and Portland, Oregon—my hometown—an hour-ish to the south.
In 2008, Chip took over as administrative assistant—just after the museum had recovered from the flood. “That’s my shame,” he jokes now. “I missed it, and it was one of the biggest miracles of the place.”
In 2010, Lee handed over the scepter. Today Chip presides over an institution that sees some seventeen thousand visitors a year and boasts its own army of volunteers, most of them veterans who have their own stories to tell.
Unlike a lot of small institutions, the Veterans Memorial Museum operates in the black—not by a huge amount, but these days anything above break-even is a huge success.
How does it do it?
Part of the answer is a very minimal operating budget, below $150,000 a year—it surely helps not to have mortgage payments. Then there are the perspiration and inspiration of the volunteers, many of whom start as visitors and get hooked.
“We honor relationships,” says Chip. “We don’t just say, pay your admission and look at old stuff.” People get involved and become part of the museum community. Their contributions don’t show up on the balance sheet, but they are critical to the museum.
The “old stuff” the museum puts on display is always part of a story, one that tells more than just the tale of heroes or battles. Cooks, truck drivers, clerks, medics, infantrymen—the full range of the services are represented and personalized; it’s as if the man or woman down the street is personally sharing the tale of his or her life. More important, the museum serves as a nexus for a veterans community, whether locals or visitors.
The museum’s veterans programs have two themes—heal and honor. Chaplains are generally on hand during events in case memories become overwhelming. The museum’s small refreshment area features snacks and such and often becomes an unintended blessing, as it has morphed into a sharing place for visitors telling their own stories.
“When you’re looking at our display, you’re making a connection to the veteran,” notes Chip. “It’s not all blood and guts and glory.”
It’s real people.
The effects are endless. There was the Vietnam veteran who wandered in one afternoon for a little peace and quiet—his grandkids were having a party, and after a while there was only so much he could take. He happened to start talking to one of the staff and suddenly opened with his tale—wounded with a buddy, he’d been triaged at an evacuation site, waiting for an inbound helicopter. The medic decided he was worse off, and so the man was put on the next chopper out. His friend waited for another flight.
The friend died there, waiting on the ground for the helicopter.
The guilt still haunted him. Why me? Why not my friend?
Maybe your large family, ventured Chip, who’d listened as he told the story.
“I never thought of it that way,” admitted the man.
The museum has branched out beyond its display cases. It sponsors a Civil War reenactment that has become one of the biggest in the state, perhaps because so many Civil War veterans migrated to the Pacific Northwest following the war. There’s also a car show, and Chip and his team are on the lookout for more ways to reach a new generation that will have less connection to veterans than those from World War II or Vietnam, where the draft meant so many families were familiar with military service and valued information about what their loved ones and ancestors might have done.
But the stories of the men and women who served remain the centerpiece. Everyone finds a different connection. Among the most poignant for Chip are the artifacts for a corporal killed in Vietnam—including a Purple Heart and another medal, as well as letters—that were found and bought in a garage sale. Contacted by Lee, who thought they might want the items, the family said they wanted nothing to do with them.
He died in Vietnam. We’re done.
While shocking to so
me of us, it’s not an unusual sentiment for a portion of Gold Star families. The pain of loss in many cases is so great that the survivors push away all memories. Attempting to do something positive with the memory can be an impossibly difficult task.
“About 2007, or 2008, one of the corporal’s platoon members came through,” says Chip. The man had carried the corporal’s body out of the jungle. Overcome with emotion at seeing the display, he later wrote the museum a letter detailing his memories and experience. It’s now on display.
Next to that display is one remembering a local Medal of Honor winner, a man who had jumped on a hand grenade. The two displays speak of the range of memory—one trumpeted, one muted—that war evokes.
Every tour Chip gives ends with the story of Jeff, a local kid from Spokane who at age ten realized he wanted to help people through first aid. He became an EMT, then a medic in the National Guard. Deployed in Iraq, he was in Baghdad, working in a trauma center, when an Iraqi doctor asked for supplies for a clinic a few miles outside of the city. On their day off, Jeff and some others went to deliver those supplies; while en route, their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device, or IED. Jeff took the brunt of the explosion, dying instantly but saving the others.
“To love and live with passion” was Jeff’s motto. He picked it up when he was sixteen; today it is enshrined on his marker at the cemetery. He certainly fulfilled that; his service and sacrifice were made in the hopes that we, too, would remain free to fulfill it.
I drove up one day with my father, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps. The visit prompted memories of his early days with my mom as well as his service. Inside the museum, Chip took us on our own private tour, filling us in on so many of the stories connected with the displays.
When it came time for the day’s program, veterans came up individually to address the crowd and tell them a few words about their service. I was moved practically to tears.
As important as the displays are in teaching others what military service and lives are like, the best part of the museum are the people you meet there—not only the veterans but the people who come to honor them, to learn a little bit about them, and to pass that knowledge on to others. It’s a ripple effect of information that forms a deep bond between the past, present, and future.
“We can’t let these stories go,” says Chip. “We have to share them.”
And that’s what Veterans Memorial Museum does so well.
Perseverance and Remembrance
Kim Roller and the Indy
Spreading the stories of veterans could be the motto of another Pacific Northwest native, Kim Roller. Not that she set out to do that, exactly.
Kim was a mom in Utah around 2003 when she booked a flight to see her sister in Southern California. The weather in California was undoubtedly beautiful—as a former resident, I know—but the weather in between was decidedly not, and Kim found her flight delayed for several hours. Wandering the airport, she happened into a bookstore and picked up a copy of Doug Stanton’s book on the USS Indianapolis disaster, In Harm’s Way.
The USS Indianapolis—CA-35—was a heavy cruiser in World War II. (Technically minded buffs will point out that the ship was originally designated as a light cruiser because of its armor displacement; it was only the size of its guns that made the Navy add the word heavy. But we’ll leave all that to the experts.)
Cruisers were important ships in World War II. While smaller than aircraft carriers and battleships, they were swift and powerful, able to operate on their own or as part of a battle group. Among her many other accomplishments, the Indy served as the flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance during the war; Spruance was a key leader in the conflict’s Pacific theater. The Indy also played an important role in ending the war, delivering the uranium and some other parts of the first atomic bomb to a base on the island of Tinian in the Pacific.
Immediately after that trip, the ship sailed to Guam and then headed toward Leyte in the Philippines. She never made it.
Early in the morning of July 30, about midway to her destination, the cruiser was hit by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine. Within twelve minutes, the cruiser had rolled and begun to slide down beneath the waves. Roughly three hundred of her nearly twelve hundred crewmen died immediately or went down with the ship. Adrift, the survivors were attacked repeatedly for several days by sharks and suffered all kinds of different tortures, many of them fatal. Only 317 men remained alive when Navy rescue forces finally managed to reach them.
There’s one other element to the story that is important here. The ship’s captain, Charles McVay, was court-martialed following his rescue, charged with failure to zigzag—basically, take defensive measures meant to make it more difficult for a submarine’s torpedoes to hit the ship. He was also accused of failing to give the order to abandon ship promptly.
The court-martial was unusual and extremely controversial; McVay’s commanding admiral tried to short-circuit it but was overruled. It seems likely that the reason for the prosecution had more to do with the Navy’s failure to promptly search for or rescue the men than any alleged action on McVay’s part. Nonetheless, he was convicted, becoming the only ship’s captain (of nearly four hundred) who lost their ships to enemy action to be put on trial and successfully prosecuted. The secretary of the navy overturned the sentence but not the conviction. McVay returned to active duty, but he was forever haunted by the disaster, and it may have been a contributing factor to his suicide in 1968.
In the years that followed, many people realized that the court-martial was a grave injustice. But it was not until the 1990s when a twelve-year-old Florida student, Hunter Scott, did a National History project on the matter that public opinion persuaded Congress to pass a resolution formally exonerating him.
Kim started reading Stanton’s book in the airport and basically didn’t stop—not on the plane, not at her sister’s. She was so enthralled by the tales of the men—their suffering, their perseverance—that she decided to include it as a lesson for her kids, whom she was home schooling at the time.
Looking for a way to make the history come alive, she wondered: What if they heard it from Scott himself?
Kim tracked down the young historian, who by that time was in college. She offered to pay his way if he’d come and talk with the kids; he gladly accepted.
And by the way, he told her, did you know that two of the survivors live near you?
Kim contacted them, and they agreed to come along and help Scott make history come alive. Elated, she told some fellow home-schooling moms, who told others, who told a high school teacher. . . .
Originally planned for Kim’s home, the event was moved to a hall. When Kim arrived an hour or so before Scott’s presentation, she saw some eight hundred chairs set up.
“You have to take half of these away,” she told one of the custodians. “We’re not going to fill them, and it will look embarrassing.”
Too late, said the man. Make do.
They had to. But it turned out that the problem wasn’t empty seats—it was an overflow crowd. Word of the presentation had spread far and wide, and some eleven hundred people showed up.
Kim became friends not only with the survivors who were her neighbors but with others. She attended the crew’s 2004 reunion. Then she began helping them spread their stories in presentations to schools, businesses, and civic groups. That task went into high gear after she started working as an airline attendant, which not only gave her a flexible work schedule but also made it possible to obtain low fares for the survivors.
There are possibly as many variations to the Indy presentations as there are survivors and audiences, but when Kim’s there, you can count on her coming on stage to introduce the program dressed in 1940s garb from head to toe—even with the authentic eyebrow pencil line on the back of her calves, imitating the way young women pretended to be wearing expensive nylons during the war. There are photos, a little bit of the movie Jaws, where Scott fir
st heard of the story, and the scenes drive home the danger the men faced after the sinking. The grand finale features a survivor who can tell his specific story and answer questions from the audience.
“I like doing high schools best,” says Kim. “The schools freak out when I say I need an hour—no one thinks they’ll have the attention span to last. But I’ve never lost an audience yet.”
Indeed, the most common reaction from those who witness her presentations is a liquid one: tears.
Over the years, some of the most poignant tears have come from the survivors themselves, often behind the scenes before the actual presentation. The memories of their suffering in the water, the loss of their companions—the experience remains very real and immediate all these years later.
The men have also talked frankly about the toll the disaster took on their lives afterward. This was long before PTSD was recognized, let alone properly treated. Alcoholism was not uncommon among the survivors. For some, settling down to a productive life was beyond difficult; as one put it to Kim, “I drank myself from town to town for years.”
But overall, the stories the men tell, and the lives they’ve lived, are ones filled with hope. If they could get through such an utter tragedy, what can we get through? They did it with such limited resources. We have so many avenues to healing today, it is unconscionable not to keep trying.
It’s almost a certainty that whatever difficulties any of us encounter pale in comparison to spending days in shark-infested waters and seeing our best friends and comrades die. If these men can get beyond that—can go on to lead productive lives and inspire others to do the same—what can’t we do? We’re all survivors in our own way; the trick is to move to the next stage, where we don’t simply survive but thrive.
As time has gone on, fewer and fewer of the survivors have been left to tell the stories. Kim has kept going, believing it’s important to help while they are still alive to make that important human connection. She believes it’s important for the next generation to honor those men in person, if possible. In a very real sense, the suffering that the crew of the Indianapolis experienced was a payment for today’s freedom. The demands of tomorrow have yet to be made—but the wages will be more easily given by people who understand that they have already benefited from others.