Navy News, news from Iraq - Navy Times

Military museums limited with Iraq war exhibits

DAYTON, Ohio — A new exhibit at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton underscores the difficulty in trying to depict the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while the conflicts are still under way.

Certain missions remain classified, and some equipment is unavailable for display, because it is still being used by troops, museum officials said Monday.

An exhibit opening Tuesday at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force attempts to focus on the experience of the airmen in the two wars, featuring more than 400 artifacts, 18 fully equipped soldier mannequins, a robot demonstrating how it inspects roadside bombs and a Sikorsky special-operations helicopter that was used to covertly enter enemy territory.

Despite its large size, putting the exhibit together had its limits, said Jeff Duford, a museum historian who helped assemble the collection.

“It was pretty challenging,” he said.

For example, Duford said, some of the airman he tried to get artifacts from would get redeployed.

“Another issue is they are still using some of the equipment, and we don’t want to take things away from the warfighter,” he said.

For instance, the museum couldn’t get a pair of night-vision goggles. They had to settle for a goggles “shell” they got from a manufacturer, he said.

Since the history of the wars has yet to be fully written, the museum decided to focus on the individual Americans fighting the wars, using artifacts to tell their stories, Duford said.

“The way that people act — the heroism and sacrifice that people have — that really transcends time,” he said.

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison plans to open an exhibit this spring portraying the role of Wisconsin soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Museum officials interviewed soldiers and collected uniforms, helmets, boots and other items.

Jeff Kollath, curator of programs and exhibitions, said the Pentagon has become more restrictive about what soldiers can bring home since the Vietnam War, making it more difficult to obtain artifacts that tell important individual stories.

Kollath also said many of the soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are in the National Guard and Reserve and return to their civilian lives after deployment, leaving many stories untold.

“They’re not spending a lot of time thinking about their place in history,” he said.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., in 2006 opened a temporary exhibit that included photographs and artifacts from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Spokeswoman Gwenn Adams said it took a little longer to catalog the artifacts and prepare them for display because of the ongoing nature of the wars.

“And keeping it current,” she said. “The challenge is to keep those photographs updated.”

Other U.S. museums have had to take care in presenting conflicts whose histories haven’t been written.

Tim Clarke, spokesman for the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, says the museum had to take care not to interfere with or impose on military operations in collecting artifacts for its newly opened exhibit on military medical care in Iraq.

Last month, the museum opened an exhibit depicting a former Air Force tent hospital in Balad, Iraq. The museum stepped in after learning that the hospital’s emergency room and trauma bay, where the most seriously wounded soldiers were taken, were to be demolished. Artifacts from the hospital were shipped to the museum in April.

Museum spokesman Tim Clarke said that in collecting the artifacts the museum took care not to interfere with military operations or impose on soldiers as they did their jobs. And he said the museum took its time to learn all it could about the wounded soldiers who are depicted.

Duford said the Air Force museum benefited from the generosity of the depicted airmen, who donated their artifacts to the museum unconditionally and permanently.

Among them is Ramon Colon-Lopez, who took part in search-and-rescue missions in Afghanistan and provided security to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

Colon-Lopez, 37, donated a blanket he used to blend in with the Afghan population as well as a pink and purple stuffed Cheshire Cat he took on his missions as a good-luck charm.

“I thought about it for awhile. But looking at preserving the history of what we’ve done, there couldn’t be a better place,” he said. “As far as the declassified aspect of things, I think it does a great job of depicting what we have done so far. We’re not done.”