A preview of the new World War I Memorial in DC — and why it’ll hit you hard

Who cares anyway?

The finishing touches are being put on the new World War I Memorial in D.C. It’s a three-acre site sitting right along Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Freedom Plaza.

On Friday, WTOP got a preview of the new memorial ahead of its opening next weekend.

The centerpiece is a 60-foot wall of sculptures, 38 in total, which aims to tell a story from the start of the war all the way to the end. It took sculptor Sabin Howard about four and a half years to make it.

“The story is of a soldier, a dad, in an allegory for the United States where he leaves home, enters into battle,” said Howard. “From that horrible experience, he’s transformed, shellshocked, and then he returns home to hand his daughter, the next generation, the helmet. And she is World War II.”

What stands out the most is the vivid detail given to each soldier’s face. Anyone looking at it can see the emotion — whether it’s fear, despair or pain. The dirt, sweat and tears are all there to behold.

“We spent an average of 650 hours on each one of these figures, working from a life model. And a lot of those models from the middle to the end of the sculpture are veterans from the Marine Corps, Navy SEAL and Army Rangers, and so their faces had all seen PTSD,” said Howard.

“And that kind of changes the whole thing because, now all of a sudden, you’re sculpting real people … You’re actually learning from them what it’s like to go into war and then leave your family and come back completely changed,” he added.

Howard used words like energy and power to describe some of the sculptures, arguing that “emotion is movement” as he stood in front of the wall.

“This is (a) symphony happening behind me, where you go from quiet to like maximum animalistic energy, to a primal scream, and then all of a sudden quiet,” said Howard. “Where you go to cost of war, where it’s dead silent. It’s actually death. And then from that moment of being shell shocked, you go into a parade scene home, which is this sense of energy being turned on again. And then the final scene, the brakes get put on, where it’s really quiet, where the dad returns home, he’s changed. He’s awkward when he hands his daughter the helmet, she’s completely still, and the weight on her neck, it’s heavy.”

He added, “It’s not like a ‘Yahoo!’ moment. It’s like when you send people to war, they come back, they are not who they were when they left. And that needs to be recognized.”

Organizers behind the memorial spent the last 16 years getting to this day.

Read the entire article on the WTOP website.
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