The US infantryman finally has his due in this museum, a $100 million facility that opened last year, with Colin Powell, former secretary of state and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, giving the keynote speech.
“This site is much more than a mere memorial, and the word museum is entirely inadequate to describe it,’’ said Powell, who trained at Fort Benning as a young officer. “It is the only attraction in the country to tell the story of the infantry from the perspective of the soldier.’’
The museum, with a large rotunda entryway and a towering stone column topped by a charging bronze infantryman, is nearly 200,000 square feet of exhibit, classroom, and attraction space. It is full of thousands of artifacts that trace the history of the US Infantry since its beginning 235 years ago.
The most moving exhibit would seem to be the first, “The Last Hundred Yards,’’ a slightly inclined, enclosed space of 300 feet. A longheld military concept is that the last 100 yards of any battle belong to the infantrymen who must charge that last, dangerous span to finish the battle.
It is the museum’s signature exhibit, with lifelike scenes from eight major infantry battles, starting with the American Revolution and finishing with Operation Desert Storm. Here are small reenacted battle dioramas that feature cast figures of infantry soldiers bearing authentic weapons, a World War II glider, and Huey helicopter. Haunting music from the Mel Gibson movie “We Were Soldiers’’ filters down from above.
Here you will see World War I doughboys on rubble-strewn streets, old war footage playing on broken buildings. There is an Army paratrooper displayed at the recapture of Corregidor in 1945, war film playing within his parachute, and across from that, soldiers scaling a rock wall at Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, with vintage film played upon it. Just up the walkway is a display of bayonet-bearing infantrymen at Millett’s bayonet attack in the Korean War, and beyond that a Huey helicopter landing in a Vietnamese field.
