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Museum relates Vietnam experience

SAN DIEGO — For 20 years, two window-box displays at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego’s Command Museum recounted the Marines’ part of the Vietnam War.

This summer, however, the legacy of Vietnam leathernecks will be retold on a grander scale as the museum opens a new gallery, replete with a mini-tunnel and bunker complex, interactive maps, veterans’ recounting of firefights and scores of displays including prisoner-of-war uniforms, booby traps and other notable collectibles.

Those plans are part of a $1 million project for a Vietnam gallery at the museum, which serves as a public gallery, as well as a teaching tool to show young, prospective Marines their Corps’ history, up close.

“The Vietnam exhibit is very important,” said retired Lt. Col. Thomas Richards, the museum’s executive director and a Vietnam veteran.

Richards said he hopes the new gallery will interest more Vietnam veterans, many draftees whose two-year enlistments largely encompassed their combat tours and who haven’t felt strong ties to the Corps, and draw them back into the fold.

“We’re preserving a legacy — their legacy as Marines — but we’re also blazing the future of the Marine Corps by training recruits,” said Richards, who received the Navy Cross as a young corporal and fire team leader. He is the national senior commander of the Legion of Valor, a veterans group.

A $150,000 gift from the MCRD Museum Historical Society this month set the stage for contractors to begin the bulk of the construction work in the gallery. The Vietnam gallery will occupy some vacant space on the second floor of Building 26, a former barracks that houses the museum and the society’s bookstore.

A 4-by-8-foot floor map, depicting a topographic relief map of Vietnam, will greet visitors, and embedded lights will direct them to one of four galleries detailing combat operations and events. Text and photos, along with wartime artifacts, will showcase veterans’ stories. Audio recordings will recount veterans’ battles and life in the war zone.

A committee of historians and combat veterans, museum docents and history professors is helping craft the gallery’s stories. The group has begun sorting through reams of documents, photographs and boxes packed with items reflecting the war and the Corps from 1954 to 1975.

“There’s just so many things that happened in that time span,” said museum director Barbara McCurtis. “It’s going to be a big job.”

The foundation of the gallery will be combat. Infantrymen in Vietnam saw combat more frequently than leathernecks did during World War II as helicopters carried troops quickly into war zones, said exhibits specialist Chuck Archuleta.

The museum’s collection is varied but not complete, and museum officials hope veterans and history buffs will share interesting stories or notable items, Archuleta said.

“We’d entertain any donation, anything from Vietnam,” he said.

Among the artifacts needed: photographs from 1971 to 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese; uniform and equipment of North Vietnamese regular soldiers; and gear and photographs of Navy corpsmen and enemy medics.

Work on the collection began in earnest in late 2005, when Ellen Guillemette, the museum’s archivist, spent her holiday break culling through the large collection of photographs. Last September, Archuleta built the frame for the small tunnel and bunker complex, “just like a regular firebase bunker.”

Museum workers are meticulous about their work. They hope to accurately reflect veterans’ experiences, and they note that the historical displays showcasing war stories, events and experiences will vary over time.

“It’s important that people learn the real story. It’s important for us as historians, that they hear the right story,” McCurtis said.

“Invariably, somebody says, you forgot this,” she added, noting, “when we open the door, it is the beginning.”

The museum’s current offerings include Marines’ continuing participation in Iraq and Afghanistan, an important focus of late in the teaching of recruits, who visit on Training Day 20 for a three-hour museum tour. “With the recruit, who has no background, you want to be able to tell them, [this] is Marine Corps history,” McCurtis said, “and their battle is no more or less important than the others.”

This year, the museum is open Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Doors to the Historical Society’s gift shop are also open Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.