Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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the military. And it is primarily military museums they now work with to get these planes, located in Dayton or Quantico, not the Boneyard directly. The other half are not lent but purchased from private sellers and businesses who have no more use for a plane but do not want to see it scrapped. Beyond the museum’s origins, as a by-product of the Boneyard, the reason for this has to do with the greater availability and variety of military aircraft when compared with commercial planes or spacecraft. Like other local businesses and organizations, Pima is indebted to the permanent war economy’s abundant expenditure of objects, in this case conveniently concentrated in one location.10 Yet, what it does with airplanes is quite variable. Today, the museum is no longer in the hands of military officers or veterans, although it may engage with either depending on the exhibit in question.
A contrasting example is the 390th Memorial Museum, which is a separate entity from Pima, but is located on the same property. The director, Wally, is a retired Air Force pilot, and sees the primary focus of the museum as the memorialization of the 390th Bomb Group and the equipment and people who supported their efforts during World War II and Korea. The displays in this museum did discuss missions, specifically with B-17 and photographs of bomber crews. According to Bennett’s field notes:
A docent in the Memorial Museum had only been working there for six weeks. He explained that his uncle was a pilot in WWII who was killed in action and his dad was also in the military, a tank commander who was wounded in Korea, so he’s always “been in it.”
One of the volunteer docents at this museum comes from an “Air Force family.” Like many children in military families, Chuck grew up all over—primarily in Dayton, Jakarta, and Colorado Springs—but he eventually ended up in Tucson in 1978. He used to be able to see the tails of C-141 Starlifters at the Boneyard in the distance when he was lifeguarding as an adolescent. He thought they looked like whale fins. Those planes were eventually all recycled, but Pima got one. He remembers that, after his father retired, he worked for Western International Aviation, which acquires and refurbishes military planes from the Boneyard to resell. “I remember one time, they repaired a plane, got it flying, took it to France for someone there. . .and then another specific time they got a C-54, which is a four-engine cargo plane, running again and they took that up to Alaska for the fishing industry, for the canning industry so they could run stuff back and forth.” Like his father, when Chuck was finished with his military service, he also became involved in the restoration of military aircraft, along with the commemoration of service members.
As I will discuss below, at Pima these twin pursuits are in tension with one another. In Chuck’s case, he has worked both as a docent at the museum and as a model builder. In 2010, he cofounded the Sonoran Desert Model Builders (SDMB) club, a chapter of the International Plastic Modeling Society (IPMS) and the second one in the Tucson area. Some of the other modelers have military backgrounds; some are artists, carpenters, or work in electronics. They build all kinds of things—scenes from movies like Jaws, boats, commercial aircraft—but they do a lot of work at and around Pima and the 390th Memorial Museum, as well as with contemporary and retired military pilots. Along with the IPMS, the mode builders donated boxes of models and supplies to Iraq for model-building clubs in the armed services to use during their downtime. And one of those service members eventually joined the SDMB.
In 2014 the SDMB completed a project on World War II spotter planes that drew the attention of the board members of the memorial museum. In 2015, they began a project completing a model of the airfield in England used by the 390th. Fourteen by eight feet, the Station 153 Parham Field Diorama shows not only planes flying but the infrastructure that kept them flying. In this way, the model of the airfield reflects the repair-scape that surrounds and supplies the museum. This includes, in Chuck’s words, “individual squadrons, where they stayed. . .maintenance squadrons. . .where the women stayed. It represents the whole thing, so it’s not just about flying planes, it’s about keeping planes flying, all the supplies involved, all the people involved.” The finished model, we were told, would include a baseball game, dogs, people on bicycles, and letters reflecting on life on and around the airfield at the time.
Wally, Chuck, and the other volunteers see the diorama as a way of situating military machines within a place and a time, as well as a specific war. Wally explicitly said that this conflicted with the emphasis of Pima. As someone actively seeking out militarized human connections, Chuck has been collecting models of A-10 Thunderbolt II’s in his spare time, thinking that they could be used in a future project painting them, perhaps with young people. Such an event might draw Martha McSally, Republican US senator from Arizona, who flew the A-10 when she was an Air Force colonel, or the female commander of the local base, both of whom came to Pima when they launched their latest exhibit on women in flight. Wally also trained people on the A-10 during his service, so Chuck realizes there is a lot of potential for this old plane to inspire interest and excitement among commemorators, like himself.
Flight or Fight
Attempts to demilitarize the museum and foundation are not done in name only, but involve making available different ways of interpreting planes on display. Put differently, it means taking a weapon out of circulation, restoring it, and displaying it in such a way that visitors can come to appreciate alternative ideas about military objects. According to James, the way that artifacts are displayed at Pima is fairly uniform, whether or not they were used in the military, in space, or for commercial purposes. This is despite routine feedback from visitors that indicate something else is expected or desired. As he put it, “In general, the public expects the military stuff to be displayed in a more commemorative tone than the nonmilitary aircraft on display. They expect us to be a little more worshipful of people who were using these things in the war.”
James was typically this open and direct in conversation. Like many of the people interviewed for this book, James characterized himself as both insider and outsider. Many people came to the area as military personnel or as children of them. Others settled in the Southwest after growing up elsewhere in the country, but became drawn to the area around the Boneyard in one way or another. James received a master of arts degree in public history from New Mexico State University, and working at the museum was his first job out of college. He describes himself as always having been enthusiastic about aviation and aeronautics, though not wealthy enough to fly. Besides, he said, taking apart planes and finding out that commercial airliners are held together by four to six two-inch bolts, and nothing more, can put one off of flying entirely. When asked, James was quick to voice criticism of military spending, in line with the focus of chapter 1:
Obviously we need to have a military. I personally think our military wastes an awful lot of money on things that they don’t necessarily need to be spending money on. Everything wears out and gets to that point in its life, so it wasn’t necessarily a waste of money to buy those things at the time, although it kind of seems like it when you see four thousand of them just sitting in the desert. It’s more a matter of how they decide to spend money, [and] the complete dysfunction in the way the Pentagon budget is set and spent is really disheartening.
James has no military background, though around half of his volunteers and a significant number of visitors do. If there are many who expect that the museum’s staff will be dedicated to commemorating the military, loan agreements with the government state that any borrowed planes should be preserved, as James put it, “in a manner that does not produce a detriment to the image of the military.” But this stipulation allows for a wide interpretation. And this is evident in the way they restore planes and arrange their exhibits. According to James, “We’ve tried to move away from [military commemoration], but it’s a fact of how this is done. The cultural attitude of ‘the greatest generation’. . .is very ingrained, and with the events of the last fifteen years, the attitude toward veterans, anyway, has become much more respectful, perhaps overly respectful in some cases.” In effect, there is a tension within the museum between two competing approaches: one, more about war and those who fight wars, and the other a more technical history of flight itself. James expanded on this at some length:
Probably our greatest competing focus is between technological history presentation and military commemoration. . . We try to stay to the technological history side, rather