Who Curates Recent American Wars? Looking in Arlington Cemetery and at The Wall That Heals

Abstract

War, a central research topic in international relations, has traditionally been studied through the portal of states trying to manage an anarchic environment through war and diplomacy. Certain categories of individuals and groups routinely feature as war authorities while others do not at all. Ordinary people called on to execute state-led wars, made to suffer wars, grieve them, and die in them, are not usually credited with war authority. This article compares two American sites of war memorialization–Arlington National Cemetery and the (Vietnam Veterans) Wall That Heals–on the question of war authority. It finds that in struggles with the Arlington Cemetery management, civilians have gained the authority to present graves of soldiers deceased in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Section 60) in ways that challenge state ownership of soldier bodies and histories. At the traveling Wall That Heals, a facsimile of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, the current cultural tendency to heroize members of the military is on view in an extreme form that elevates ordinary soldiers to the status of Everyman executive authorities. Both sites show the importance of studying war as a decentralized site of authoritative war knowledge that encompasses civilian experiences with war.