Seabee Museum Awaits New Home, Artifacts From Iraq Front

The few civilians who trickle into the Seabee museum’s two rundown Quonset huts often come on the same plaintive quest: Grandpa has died and his kids want to see the kinds of tools he used, the guns he shot, the uniform he wore when he was fighting in World War II.

In a few years, relatives could well drop in to see the Humvee that Mom drove and the chemical suit she wore when she fought in Iraq.

And, if all goes according to plan, the artifacts will be displayed in a new $12-million state-of-the-art home for a collection, with such items as the compass used by Adm. Robert E. Peary at the North Pole and the script used by John Wayne in the 1944 film, “The Fighting Seabees.”

Dramatic changes are in store for the Port Hueneme facility, one of the largest military museums in the state and housed on the grounds of Naval Base Ventura County. The project is planned for land just off the base, to increase public access, which has all but dried up due to tighter security measures on military bases. And as the war in Iraq winds down, artifacts that illuminate the Seabees’ role are expected to pour in, thanks to both Seabees in the field and Navy historians traveling with the troops.

Started during World War II, the Navy’s Seabees, short for construction battalion, build everything from barracks to bridges. They frequently are called upon to set up aid camps at disaster sites. In the war in the Pacific, they sometimes fought their way ashore in advance of the troops, clearing beaches and building roads to ease the path of the combat forces that would follow.

The expected flood of museum pieces will contrast with a comparative trickle after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the military was less aggressive in telling its story, some military historians say.

“That was a good learning experience for the Navy,” said Lara Tobias, the Seabee museum’s curator. “It had been so long since we’d been in active combat that we weren’t thinking about collecting artifacts. This time around, we’re doing something about it.”

Curators connected with the other services agree.

“The object of the Gulf War was to move as fast as possible,” said Neil Morrison, museum director at the Army’s Ft. Irwin training center in the Mojave Desert. “Afterward, we said, ‘Hey! You forgot the museums!’ ”

This time, the Army has about 30 historians deployed to the Middle East. They collect combat photos, videotapes and documents, both paper and electronic. They compile thousands of oral histories, talking to any GI with a story to tell. And they try to separate the detritus of war from museum pieces that can breathe life into history’s grim narrative.

“If the units were in charge, you’d get 500,000 AK-47s and nothing else,” said Maj. Les Melnyk, an Army National Guard historian. “But people want to know how the soldiers lived. Historians are more likely to save things like the guidebooks we gave the troops on Iraqi cultural sensibilities or the propaganda leaflets that we sent out or the goggles that we used in sandstorms.”

The aim, he said, is more than just “neat history.” For instance, the potential exposure of Gulf War veterans to toxic chemicals is hard to pin down because troop movement was recorded on computer systems long since scrapped, Melnyk said.

“We have a better notion of where units were day-to-day in World War II than in the Gulf War,” he said.

The Navy also is working to record the war as it happens. Before the first shot was fired in Iraq, reservists such as Cmdr. Dan Struble hopped from ship to ship in the waters of the Middle East, chronicling Navy activities both momentous and mundane.

In Afghanistan, he spent a few days with Seabees who were building airstrips and detainee camps.

“They were my best artifact collectors, probably because of their reputation for being ingenious scavengers,” he said.

On some of Struble’s ships, the items offered up for historic preservation were baseball caps or coffee mugs.

But Seabees gave him more substantive pieces, such as maps of the air base in Kandahar, training aids for Afghan fighter pilots and rusty shackles used by anti-Taliban Afghans to restrain prisoners.

“They looked like something out of the Middle Ages,” he said.

Back in the U.S., museum curators await shipment of important pieces from Iraq. Tobias also has put word out among Seabee commanding officers, urging them and their troops to be on the lookout for fragments of history.

“We’re on their radar screen,” she said. “They’re definitely thinking about us.”

A doctoral candidate in history, Tobias has undertaken a collection mission or two herself.

At Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where Seabees built detention units for hundreds of Afghan fighters, she scooped up a U.S. government-issue prayer rug and a Koran, among other things.

Where such finds will be displayed is unknown.

The old museum is growing dilapidated. It had its beginnings in 1947 as a resting place for the tanks, machine guns, swords, and even a Japanese Zero fighter hauled back by veterans of World War II. But before that the huts had served as a post office and a beer hall.

They lack standard humidity and temperature controls. Moisture seeps from a cement base through an industrial rug -- rotting baseboards and nurturing mildew on some vintage uniforms in storage.

“Quonset huts are great, but they’re not made for museums,” Tobias said. The government is barred from capital spending on all but a handful of military museums, but a private group called the CEC / Seabee Historical Foundation has raised $3 million toward a new facility.

CEC stands for the Civil Engineer Corps, a Navy branch that also trains at Port Hueneme.

“Unless we do something, all we’ll have in a few years is a sign that says ‘Museum,’ ” said foundation trustee Bob Quinn, a moving force behind the facility’s reconstruction.

These days, it’s mostly active Seabees who drop by to check out the ancient diving equipment, the controls from a now-defunct nuclear plant built by Seabees in the Antarctic, the paintings of Polynesian scenes by Seabees during World War II.

With heightened security measures requiring civilians to make appointments for guided tours, the number of museum visitors has dropped from 18,000 to 6,000.

The foundation hopes to have the new building shipshape in four years. It will update tired exhibits, immersing visitors in scenes like a World War II recruiting office and a Navy boot camp. On an old bulldozer blade that serves as a screen, will be continuous footage of Seabees sweating in the Pacific sun as they carve airstrips out of the jungle -- scenes drawn from hundreds of reels of film in storage.

A gallery devoted to military events since World War II will hold remnants of the 2003 war in Iraq -- here, perhaps, a charred chunk of a control tower, there a container of Handi-Wipes, the closest thing to a shower the desert offered many troops.

“We’re not getting rid of anything,” Tobias said. “We’re just going to be telling the story in a more interesting way.”