Under a sky-piercing spire that seizes the Quantico skyline, a long-planned tribute to the U.S. Marine Corps is set to open its doors this week.
The 210-foot, Iwo Jima-inspired pinnacle serves as the external signature of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, an 118,000-square-foot structure, which sits a stone’s throw from the sprawling Virginia base.
The museum, which opens Friday, the 231st birthday of the Corps, features a panoply of exhibits from Pearl Harbor and Korea to ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other galleries are planned stretching further back into history to the colonial period and Civil War.
Deputy Museum Director Col. Joseph C. Long, who served as a radio operator in an infantry unit during the Vietnam War, touts the project as “a good place for people to understand about our ethos, about our history, about our background and our traditions.”
“People have a Hollywood vision of marines, and Hollywood has almost painted us as cannon-fodder,” Long said Thursday. “It’s very important to understand that there is a method to the reason that we do things, and we have a very intricate plan of action in everything that we do.”
But the romantic vision of the Marines has also served them well. The Marines motto, Semper Fidelis, “always faithful,” led to the belief that the Marine is always faithful to the Corps and to his or her comrades.
The museum is intended as a centerpiece of a larger, multi-building complex planned for the site off Interstate 95, which will eventually be home to an armory, memorial park, hotel, chapel and IMAX theater.
The museum opens to a sprawling interior that is partially encircled by stretch of smaller galleries. Exhibit planners employed a variety of mediums — video, photographs and life-sized dioramas — to draw a half-century of Marine Corps warfare.
Some exhibits are gory and heart-wrenching, like a spread of high-resolution photos of Marines in action in the Middle East. Others are interactive, even comical — the museum boast both a tilting, turning flight simulator and an electronic firing range where visitors can test their marksmanship for a small fee.
Boston-based exhibit designer Chris Chadbourne said the museum was created with an expectation that 70 percent of visitors would not be marines. Exhibits, he said, were geared to be authentic and understandable to a lay audience, and relied on methods other than a “dry recitation of facts.”
Despite the ostensibly patriotic, pro-military themes of the entire project, Long said the museum is meant to be apolitical.
“We purposefully stay away from politics,” Long said. “The big thing for us is to show that when we are called on, we go and do what we are called on to do.”
