The AF Memorial Controversy

The Air Force and the Marines at war.

Last fall, with a threatened government shutdown hours away, congressional leaders and senior White House officials huddled to negotiate the crucial final details of more than $400 billion in spending. But negotiators put aside disagreements over major issues like abortion and labor regulations to handle a dispute just as hot: the duel between the Air Force and the Marine Corps over the site of a memorial.

In 1993, Congress approved a request from the Air Force to build a monument, with private funds, on an unspecified site. The Air Force Memorial Foundation began a fundraising drive led by Joe Coors Jr. and boosted by defense contractors. After reviewing proposed locations around Washington, the foundation settled on a lovely spot, a quiet 25- acre hillside near Arlington Cemetery in Virginia that enjoys a commanding view of the capital's monuments across the Potomac River. Since 1954, this same hillside, known as Arlington Ridge, has also been home to the Iwo Jima Memorial.

The Iwo Jima Memorial commemorates the 26,000 Marine casualties suffered in the battle for that remote Pacific island in 1945. The sculpture is based on a famous photograph of a band of Marines raising the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi in the midst of fierce fighting. Over the past 45 years, the memorial has come to represent the sacrifice of all fallen Marines, and the Corps's veterans are determined to protect their hill from the threatened Air Force invasion.

Understandably so. There is more at stake in the fight than inter-service bragging rights. There is indeed a touch of Kulturkampf behind the plans for a slick new modern memorial near the Iwo Jima sculpture, which Washington art poobah J. Carter Brown once dismissed as "kitsch." And there certainly is a huge helping of inte-rservice envy, as the Air Force, formed in 1947, seeks by association some of the glory of the tradition-soaked, 224-year-old Marines.

The services have drafted veterans in Congress, bureaucrats, lawyers, and defense firms in a struggle that threatens to sour the branches' relationship for years to come. In official backing, the Air Force so far has the advantage. The National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the Commission of Fine Arts have all endorsed the proposed two-acre site and the memorial's design-which calls for a 50-foot-tall aluminum, origami-like structure that would include an underground visitors center.

Supporters of the Air Force memorial argue that the Marine Corps tacitly approved the proposed location in 1994 when Corps commandant Carl E. Mundy Jr. refrained from objecting. For his part, Mundy says he wasn't informed just how intrusive the Air Force memorial would be. In any case, the Marines have now formally objected to the plans. More than two dozen former Marine generals, including five former commandants, have appealed to the secretary of the interior to preserve the current status of the "serene and contemplative park" on Arlington Ridge.

Complaints about the proposed memorial from Marines in the field have reached the Pentagon. And retired Marine Corps lieutenant general Charles Cooper, chairman of the Iwo Jima Preservation Committee, recently told his supporters: "At this time, we need to avoid looking back, avoid any self-recrimination about whether or not our listening posts were on full alert. The fact is the enemy has penetrated our wire and our mission is to restore the integrity of our position."

How deep run the feelings? Former Navy secretary James Webb, the son of an Air Force veteran, sees a lack of gratitude for the Marine Corps he himself served. "The very mission in the battle of Iwo Jima," he wrote, "carried out at a cost of 1,000 dead Marines for every square mile of territory taken, was to eliminate enemy fighter attacks on Air Force bombers passing overhead and to provide emergency runways for Air Force pilots who had flown in harm's way." Retired Marine colonel Dave Severance, who commanded the troops who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, calls the proposed monument a historic insult: "I am convinced we Marines have done enough for the Army Air Corps/U.S. Air Force without having to share our Marine Corps War Memorial park with them."

In response, the Air Force invokes the 52,173 combat deaths suffered by the Army Air Forces in World War II who "deserve a similar respect," as one retired Air Force general put it. Another retired general, Chuck Link, president of the Air Force Memorial Foundation, argues that the Marines are reacting to an "imagined slight" because "there is no way our memorial interferes with their statue." The Air Force memorial would be 500 feet away from the Marines' monument and shielded from it by a stand of evergreens.

But Marine supporters don't care how separate the new monument is. The Friends of Iwo Jima and Marine veterans have recently retained a top- notch law firm to battle the National Park Service over the environmental impact of the proposed memorial. "Marines never quit. We will fight it out to the end, bitter or otherwise," declares former congressman Gerry Solomon, also a former Marine.

Last year during the budget negotiations, it was Solomon who negotiated an agreement to consider moving the proposed Air Force site, only to have Senate Appropriations Committee chairman and former fighter pilot Ted Stevens nix the arrangement. If construction of the Air Force memorial is stalled until the end of next year, congressional approval of any monument would have to be reaffirmed, and the battlefield would again become Capitol Hill. Solomon's fellow former Marines, including senators Pat Roberts, Conrad Burns, and Craig Thomas, will continue his fight, while Stevens, with the support of minority leader Tom Daschle, an Air Force veteran, will continue to front for the Air Force.

The Marines are willing to help the Air Force win quick approval for an alternative location near Arlington Cemetery, which would indeed be suitable. Through 45 years of quiet prayers, sunset parades and wreath- laying ceremonies, the Marines have an emotional and traditional claim on Arlington Ridge that ought to be honored. A new Air Force memorial right next door would be a monument, among other things, to disrespect. Surely the Air Force can commemorate its fallen just as well elsewhere and, rather than bring the Marines to their knees, content itself for now with the defeat of a far more fitting adversary-Slobodan Milosevic.