The National Medal of Honor Heritage Center
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Last week was my spring break, and my wife and I took the kids to Chattanooga for a long weekend. We had two sites we wanted to make sure to visit: Chickamauga battlefield, about which more later, and the Tennessee Aquarium. We also obeyed the classic command to see Rock City and, as an extra treat, visited Chattanooga’s National Medal of Honor Heritage Center.
The museum
The Charles H Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, named for a Chattanooga native who is currently the only living Medal of Honor recipient from the ETO during World War II, is a stellar little museum. We visited on a whim following our morning at the Tennessee Aquarium; the Heritage Center is located right next door on the same plaza.
After paying a modest entrance fee the tour begins upstairs with an interactive media room. Computers set into tables allow visitors to search a database of Medal of Honor recipients, and digital banners on the walls display continuously changing photos of recipients both well known and obscure. My favorite feature of this room was a wall-sized touchscreen display featuring a 3D globe dotted with the locations of Medal of Honor actions, each of which you could tap on to bring up a box with a photo of the recipient, the date of the incident, and the citation. The clusters of dots, especially around the battlefields of all theatres of the Civil War and in western Europe in both World Wars, as well as scattered across the Pacific and other often surprising out-of-the-way places, gives you a graphic sense of where the United States’ wars have been fought, as well as the scale of the fighting.
From the interactive room you enter a theatre for a short film about the Medal and its history. From here, you continue through the best part of the museum, a carefully designed series of exhibits walking you through American wars since the Civil War. Each exhibit has a life-size diorama of two or three Medal of Honor recipients from the conflict. These are exceptionally well done, with great attention to detail. Others are featured in large-scale photographs or well-designed displays with uniforms, artifacts—the museum preserves over 6,000 items related to the Medal of Honor—and some element of the environment in which those profiled earned the medal: the cliffs at Hacksaw Ridge, a sandbagged hootch for three Vietnam recipients, a dusty road for one who fought in Iraq. A few have video reenactments that play in screens set into the walls, and at several points a multimedia station features interviews with living Medal of Honor recipients.
Among those profiled are Dr Mary Walker, the only female Medal of Honor recipient; Civil War officers James Andrews (of the Great Locomotive Chase) and Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas); Buffalo soldier George Jordan; World War I soldiers Charles Whittlesey, Joseph Adkison, and Alvin York; conscientious objector turned medic Desmond Doss; Marine officer Alexander Bonnyman; and Kyle Carpenter. There are a great many others as well.
While I didn’t have the luxury of stopping to read every sign or piece of information—touring with a six- and a four-year old keeps you moving—the displays offered lots of opportunities to tell stories and talk to the kids about what they were seeing. It’s hard to know what sticks, but they came away seeming to appreciate more what being brave and sacrificing for others means.
This was especially true of the Vietnam display. While many of those profiled in the dioramas lived to fight again or to tell their stories to future generations, the men whose stories were selected to represent Vietnam—Marine Rodney Davis and Navy corpsman David Ray—were killed in action, both by taking the blast of enemy grenades in order to save others. A recurrent theme of the museum, a quotation displayed in several places, is John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The museum shows vividly what this means on the battlefield.
Other notes
The museum has a good gift shop with well-selected items that are relevant to the museum’s topic and don’t reduce its theme to kitsch (something you can’t always count on with museum gift shops). There’s an especially good selection of books; I picked up Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary, which I’ve been looking forward to reading since it was reissued for the centennial of his actions in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
The staff and volunteers were friendly, helpful, and very accommodating to a dad touring with two children six and under. I especially appreciated their work; they represented the museum and its mission well.
In conclusion
The Medal of Honor Heritage Center offers an excellent introduction to US military history and the virtues the medal represents: patriotism, citizenship, courage, integrity, sacrifice, and commitment. While informative and moving for adults, it’s also a good place for kids to visit—the dioramas are helpful visuals, and the stories, while presented soberly and realistically, are not prohibitively graphic. I highly recommend visiting if you’re ever in the Chattanooga area.
