Andrew Wasserman —

In the fall of 1984, composer and Hanna-Barbera musical director Hoyt Curtin posed a pair of provocations to American television audiences: “If you could breathe underwater, where would you go? If you had friends underwater, who would you know?” Awash with implications both practical and philosophical, he ended his lyrics with a promise: “So much to see waiting for you and me.” Awaiting us in the watery depths, the lyrics imply, is a world unlike the terrestrial one we humans know. But what if the world underwater is not so dissimilar to the world above? What if the expressions of authority in the world we already know are just the same as those that await us down below?

As protesters of racial injustice toppled statues this summer, a curious phenomenon could be observed on both sides of the waterline. The bronze and marble bodies (or sometimes just the heads) of once-lionized men of colonialism and white supremacy were not just brought down, but they were also dumped into bodies of water. On June 7, 2020, John Cassidy’s 1896 bronze statue of seventeenth-century Royal African Company slaver Edward Colston went headfirst into England’s Bristol Harbor. This event sparked numerous dislocations across the Atlantic: Mauro Bigarani’s 1984 marble Christopher Columbus was pulled from its pedestal and shattered into several pieces on the ground before tumbling into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor; in Richmond’s Byrd Park, protesters hauled Ferrucio Legnaioli’s 1927 bronze Christopher Columbus to Fountain Lake, where it remained partially submerged; and several men in New Orleans rolled Angela Gregory’s 1938 bronze bust of John McDonough, a shipping magnate and slave owner, into the Mississippi River. Many of these sculptures were quickly fished out of the water, in some cases within twenty-four hours. For those drowned in deeper water, teams of divers were sent in after the sculptures, identifying the location of anatomical fragments or entire bodies and lashing bands around them, while on land, crews of crane operators brought them back up to the surface.

Figural public sculptures are often erected to fortify power. These cast and carved bodies survey the landscaped grounds and urban plazas upon which they have been installed. Once tipped into the water, turned sideways or upside-down, they become differently dangerous. In their temporary sea burial, they intrude on a world in which they are not usually found. They are less like a great gyre of waste, compromising longer-term planetary survival, than a kind of enemy craft. They are monitored by local and national governing agencies that quickly act to remove them, lest they remain or are joined by other unsanctioned bodies in the water, weakening claims to safety, stability, and sovereignty. The retrieval of these figures and proposed reinstallation of them on dry land is a form of homeland security, a kind of Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) operation, deployed to maintain the commemorative landscape.

With the attention given these displaced sculptures, it is surprising that more of these embodiments of national ideology have not been intentionally installed underwater in the first place. Above the waterline, these sculptures encode the desires of their commissioners to exert control over all that is “seen” by their stone and metal eyes. They also enact these desires. They are sentinels of the state, monitoring and maintaining while in place, as they are monitored and maintained by others when displaced. So where are the sculptures-as-US Border Patrol agents monitoring watery outposts? Why haven’t they been erected to assert dominance over the full expanse of a nation’s territory, extending miles from the shore and into the sea?

One exception can be found about ten miles off the coast of Clearwater, Florida. There, forty feet below the surface of the water on the sand-covered limestone shelf of the Gulf of Mexico, is a ring of a dozen cast concrete sculptures: the Circle of Heroes. Mostly standing at around six feet tall, these figures represent military service members from the US’s combat missions spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their uniforms do most of the work of differentiation and periodization. They include a Southeast Asia War soldier, a Korean War soldier, a Vietnam soldier, a Gulf War soldier, an Iraq War soldier, an Iraqi Freedom Fighter, a Navy sailor, a Marine, an Air Force pilot, an Army nurse, a pair of figures representing the concept of No Man Left Behind, and a soldier kneeling in front of a battle cross (a rifle jammed into boots with a helmet resting atop). Affixed to the base of each statue is an acrylic nameplate detailing the branch of the military represented and the financial sponsor of the specific sculpture. In the center of the arrangement is a four-foot-high, five-sided squat pillar weighing nearly six thousand pounds.¹ Attached to its sides are bronze military plaques bearing the emblems of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marines. Steel chains, resting on the ground and running through and around the formation, serve as guides that divers who visit the memorial can use to pull themselves between the figures.²

Developed and approved by the nonprofit Brighter Future Florida and managed by Pinellas County, the Circle of Heroes is conscripted into performing a trite idea of American imperial might.³ The sculptures enact the role and image of “heroes” for their audience, both underwater and on dry land, locally and nationally. As a project soaked with patriotic associations, the Circle of Heroes taps into some essential qualities of contemporary American nationhood: a permanent state of service, civic obligations to provide care, and the mobilization of figural sculpture as sources and forces of ideological and economic boosterism. In design and use, the underwater grouping resists actual ecological conservation or restoration, despite being promoted as offering ecological benefit. This was but one strategy the Circle of Heroes’ supporters employed to ensure sources of public and private funding for a project intended to be not just a static object but an operative asset contributing to the local economy. In an era in which homeland security means protecting not just populations but investments, the project’s figures literalize a practice of “armoring capitalism.”⁴ Built at a territorial margin, the memorial also finds consonance with C. J. Alvarez’s analysis of commercial, policing, and resource extraction border projects that blur the distinction between civil and military authority and give visible form to state power.⁵

In 2018, Ken Welch, Pinellas County Commission chairman, addressed the multiple ambitions of the project: “I can’t imagine a better way to share the beauty of our coastal waters and support our troops” than by constructing “an iconic attraction in the region, highlighting the service and sacrifices of those who have fought to protect the freedoms we all enjoy.”⁶ This iconic attraction was and is envisioned as a kind of pilgrimage landmark in the making, an addition to the national constellation of veterans memorials and battlefield monuments. While the Circle of Heroes has been touted in the press as “the country’s first underwater veterans memorial,” David Jolly, former Republican congressional representative and public face of Brighter Future Florida, has been more precise in his description.⁷ He has referred to the installation as “the nation’s very first underwater veterans memorial accessible to divers and the recreation community.”⁸ This designation perhaps initially calls to mind less a site of contemplative reflection than a roadside or seaside novelty. Given the specialized training, transportation, and equipment required to see and navigate the underwater memorial firsthand, the site draws a fractional audience compared to similar above-water attractions.

Fixed in place, the sculptures embody a form of enduring American military service. They permanently mark a defense of American values by permanently occupying this underwater American territory. The Circle of Heroes reflects nearly a century of American military actions, a chronology of perpetual war that has been summarized by Ronak K. Kapadia, pace Sora Y. Han, as “not the US ‘at war’ but the US ‘as war.’”⁹ Offering an alternative framework, Joseph Darda has addressed this lineage since WWII not as waging war but as waging defense.¹⁰ A rhetoric of defending the freedom of certain lives, which initially emerged to safeguard against another Pearl Harbor, has been deployed in service of anticommunism, antiterrorism, and attacking illiberal beliefs wherever they may appear. New enemies are forever generated through cultural narratives and representations, and military engagements that are framed as anticolonial and antiracist in fact serve to expand the American empire and require non-white and non-Western populations to be cast as ideologically illegitimate. As Darda succinctly states, “Defense is not the end of war: it is the transformation of war from an event into a norm.”¹¹ Never moving from their place, modifying their pose, or removing their uniforms, the underwater figures will never not be on active duty. They are in an endless state of military service to a country that now expects endless military service.

At the same time, the figures expect acts of service to be performed by multiple, occasionally overlapping, publics, and to multiple beneficiaries. This includes donors who will help meet the project’s fundraising goals so that the memorial can be fully realized. It also includes those visiting the memorial, who will provide financial support to coastal businesses. Beyond acts of reverence at the memorial site, patronage of an economy responsible for the presence of these figures becomes part of civilian service, whether onetime visitors or those making repeat trips. Veterans, whom the Circle of Heroes is conceived to honor, enact another kind of service, providing ongoing maintenance of the memorial, even as societal obligations for their own care are dismantled or denied. In ways both subtle and not, the project reveals priorities that value the building and maintaining of commemorative infrastructure over the building and maintaining of infrastructures of care for the very people commemorated.¹²

While promoted as having grand patriotic, ecologic, and economic ambitions, the Circle of Heroes is only half-realized. Once complete, the underwater installation will be made up of twenty-four statues, ultimately forming a circle one hundred feet in diameter. In coordination with the US Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers, the first twelve figures were lowered into place from a barge in late June 2019, followed by a formal dedication ceremony on August 5. Before the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic crash, the next twelve were anticipated to be installed on either Veterans Day 2020 or Memorial Day 2021.¹³ This second set of sculptures remains to be fully financed.

Phase one of the project, concerning the first twelve sculptures, relied on contracting with companies across the country that were already known for producing military memorials from casts and thus creating generic, stock figures.¹⁴ For many of the figures, their features code white. They conform to a centuries-long pattern of memorial construction in service of racialized nation-building and affirm a particular visual lexicon of the look of a national “hero” rather than reflecting the diversity of the American armed forces.¹⁵ In contrast, phase two would see the creation of customized works with more individual likenesses for the second twelve sculptures, ideally made by local artists.¹⁶ Phase one was treated as a proof of concept, used to demonstrate the viability of an underwater memorial in order to fundraise for phase two, which will be considerably more expensive.¹⁷ Although some of the original twelve statues were sponsored by different military-affiliated groups, organizers positioned the second-phase statues as opportunities for personalized memorialization for Gold Star families, veterans groups, and businesses.¹⁸ A May 2018 public presentation explained that phase two would see the creation of sculptures of Florida military luminaires, with figures like General Norman Schwarzkopf, leader of Operation Desert Storm in 1990, or even specific categories of service members, such as a hardhat diver, cited as likely candidates.¹⁹ To date, only one of these customized figures has been made.²⁰

Amateur photographs of the Circle of Heroes often show divers in wetsuits and breathing apparatuses bobbing amid the first set of sculptures. These images reveal something both kitschy and unnerving about the project. Divers hover in the murky blue-green sea, the sculptures appearing as remainders of a long-defeated empire that are yet to erode. The otherworldly unsettledness of such photographs is quite different from the crisply lit figures that appear in official promotional videos, which reveal the figures to a triumphant orchestral soundtrack using slow-panning camera movements.²¹ These amateur photographs reveal a reality also markedly different from Brighter Future Florida’s digital rendering of the site, shown in a February 2018 public presentation of the first four statues held at Sand Key Park.²² In this truly bizarre rendering, quasi-beatific spotlights cut through the water, less the effects of evenly dispersed sunlight or the beams of dive lights than the illuminations of a digital divine. They reveal artificially patinated bronze figures (rather than the actual cast concrete ones). Schools of yellow-and-black-striped fish, a digital layer of the same image file presented twice in mirror image, swim around the statues, which are framed by columns of bubbles that do not seem to emerge from any clear source. Yet, neither ruins nor active custodians of a law-and-order nation, the rendering portrays these figures as out-of-place curiosities, novelties at the bottom of the sea. The gulf between reality and representation is similar to that between reality and rhetoric, specifically the benefits that supporters promised and promoted the Circle of Heroes would offer.

This rendering also nods to the underwater project’s potential ecological dimension. The Circle of Heroes is an elaboration of an earlier project of Heyward Matthews, professor emeritus of oceanography at St. Petersburg College, and David Jolly’s uncle. In 1999, Matthews started work on Veterans Reef, an artificial reef located about ten miles off the coast of Dunedin, Florida, which is just north of Clearwater.²³ Matthews received $277,000 from the Florida Boating Improvement Program to create this underwater environment, which eventually included a Lockheed Neptune P2V-3 bomber, four barges, and groupings of limestone boulders and concrete materials. Punctured with holes and stacked to create craggy ledges and pockets of space, this installation formed a habitat to draw fish as well as anglers and divers.²⁴ Months after the reef’s dedication, a storm damaged an underwater plaque and several of the underwater craft.²⁵ The demonstrated fragility and impermanence of this arrangement informed Matthews’s decision a decade later to create a more permanent site for veterans, located about a quarter of a mile to the southeast.²⁶

Although visually similar in some respects to artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater ecological restoration “museums” or “sculpture parks” of the past two decades, the Circle of Heroes was not designed as the same kind of artificial reef as Veterans Reef.²⁷ The figures are relatively compact. Their slab bases rest firmly on the seabed. They lack the small-framed pockets of space found in Veterans Reef’s agglomerations. In an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, Matthews was explicit that the project was “not designed to provide habitat for food or game fish.”²⁸ Yet, as part of the campaign to secure public funding, the site’s contribution to “education and marine science” through “water, fish, and reef monitoring” was touted as a project benefit.²⁹ Without explaining specifically how the memorial would do so, Jolly extolled that the project would “help sustain marine life in our precious gulf waters as an artificial reef” without occluding the service uniforms of the figures.³⁰ These greenwashing efforts were successful. The first four statues were ultimately paid for as part of $50,000 in seed money from the county’s solid waste budget. This funds the county’s artificial reef program, which is itself partially funded by the financial settlement from the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill.³¹ The project was classified alongside sewer system studies, affordable housing, and new speed feedback signage as programs to “foster continual economic growth and vitality.”³²

The memorial, promoters believed, could be a major tourist attraction. As such, it could increase the county’s already close to $60 million annual revenue from tourist development taxes alone.³³ Jolly projected the economic impact of the memorial as yielding $7 million annually, driven by a national and international media campaign. It would draw a new community of divers, create eighty-four new jobs tied to the recreational boating and tourist diving industries, and continue to bolster business in local dive shops, restaurants, and hotels.³⁴ The economic boon the Circle of Heroes was projected to offer seemed too great for the county to pass up.³⁵

This intermingling of memorial and tourist economies seen in the Circle of Heroes both reflects and furthers a regional priority. Members of the county’s Tourist Development Council positioned the Circle of Heroes as contributing to a regional identity, given the project’s proximity to MacDill Air Force Base, headquarters of the US Central Command and US Operations Command, about an hour’s drive from Clearwater.³⁶ It is also near other veterans memorial sites, such as the War Veterans Memorial Park in nearby St. Petersburg, Florida, situated on onetime federal land donated to the county in 1963.³⁷ In recent years, the county has also prioritized wounded veteran commemorative namings, such as in 2006, when the city of Dunedin was named a Purple Heart City (the first such city in the nation), and in 2017, when county commissioners designated all of Pinellas County a Purple Heart County.³⁸

The proliferation of such veterans designations, particularly those emphasizing forms of sacrifice, constitutes what Erika Doss has termed the “memorial mania” that has taken over the American landscape in the last several decades. But beyond this, the Circle of Heroes also actively participates in a culture that touts concern for active and veteran service members even as it struggles to allocate needed economic and medical resources to them.³⁹ This struggle extends to keeping up with a demand for funerary sites, and the Circle of Heroes was developed as veteran cemeteries were running out of space.⁴⁰ The nationwide Urban Initiative and Rural Initiative, both launched by Veterans Affairs in the last decade (and more recently evaluated as having made “limited progress” and running behind schedule), were intended to address the lack of available resources for casket interment, a form of necessary long-term care. With the accompanying shift toward concrete columbarium construction nationwide, these initiatives also endeavored to provide access to new funerary memorial locations for living veterans for whom traveling longer distances is not a feasible option.⁴¹

Ensuring the endurance and consistent maintenance of gravesites and other memorials are often practical and material enactments of obligations to service members. As the Circle of Heroes was being developed, supporters asserted that concrete had an indefinite underwater lifetime.⁴² The decision to mark the site with four mooring buoys was also made with material rather than ecological conservation in mind. The buoys relieve boats from needing to drop anchors, diminishing the chances of damaging the sculptures below. As Matthews explained, “I’m not looking to have a whole bunch of fishermen come in; or spear fishermen bouncing a spear off a $20,000 statue.”⁴³ A nylon brush is secured to each sculpture, allowing divers to clear away any sand or silt that builds up on the figures or plaques. A recent coordinated cleanup by a dive team that removed marine growth on the sculptures’ surfaces was framed by the local press as a “mission to preserve patriotism.”⁴⁴ Care for statuary becomes equated if not conflated with care for actual bodies. This replacement of flesh and bone with cast concrete and then back again comes through in Vietnam Air Force Veteran David A. Thomas’s remark to a local reporter in early 2018. Thomas, who also built the memorial’s center marker, explained, “These are our guys, these are the people that we served with, that we knew, that we don’t know, we’ll never know, but they’re our people.”⁴⁵

The Circle of Heroes facilitates a form of care not provided by Veterans Affairs. Beyond its other purposes, the memorial was developed as a therapeutic site for disabled veterans, in line with research advocating veterans use the partial sensory deprivation and weightlessness that comes with being underwater to work through PTSD, depression, joint pain, and other effects of trauma.⁴⁶ Dive therapy organizations have formed across the country, including the Deep Sea Valkyries in Phoenix, Arizona, who were on hand for the Circle of Heroes ribbon cutting in the summer of 2019.⁴⁷ David Miller, the representative for the National American Legion at the Bay Pines VA Hospital, was also present at the ribbon cutting.⁴⁸ In his remarks to one local newspaper, he extended the value of dive therapy to alleviating psychological and physical ailments, including pain management. Diving to see the figures and the central marker would “keep [veterans] from thinking about their own problems” and “keep [veterans] off their opiates and all the medication they are given these days.”⁴⁹ There are of course some obstacles to this kind of therapy. Although promoted by Veterans Affairs, the VA and some health insurance companies do not cover the full cost of dive therapy in all cases, requiring families or secondary support networks to step in.⁵⁰ Fulfillment of an obligation for care transfers from the government to the private sector and individual citizens.

As social safety nets fail and community and national traumas compound, tiers of government and private businesses continue to invest, literally, in conventional totems of performative reverence rather than in the actual obligations owed to citizens. The seemingly novel location of the Circle of Heroes does not signal a real shift in the traditional practice of public figural sculpture. The deployment of generic military figures for the memorial’s first phase, and the anticipated more-particular cohort of service members of the second phase, offer another iteration of the oft-revived impulse to create “open-air museum[s] of national history as seen through great men.”⁵¹ Each announcement affirming dedication to these inert objects of territorial occupation calls into relief the emptiness of such gestures.⁵² Looking on its constructed scenography of patriotism masquerading as care, which also shuttles the obligation for monument maintenance to citizens, the question resurfaces: after toppling the statues of oppressive ideology, what forms of real care do we want or expect to see?