In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  standard 17.5 gallon shelter water container from the Civil Defense/Red Cross book on Emergency Mass Feeding. This standard shelter water container was a steel barrel that had two plastic liners inside and stood 22 inches tall and was 16 inches in diameter. The center plastic liner is the actual water container and the outer liner is a backup. The liners were either tied or heat sealed closed. This method of storing water does seem a bit complicated in today’s plastic-container-filled world but keep in mind that this was back before large plastic containers were in common use. The plastic liner/metal water can did hold up fairly well though. I saw a few shelters back in the late 1980s with hundreds of these drums and didn’t see any that were leaking. However, when the liners did leak, the steel barrels wouldn’t last long.

  (http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/cdmuseum2/supply/water.html)

  Hughes encouraged a peek inside. The space, which offers no walking room, is not welcoming. The water and cracker containers are stacked over each other, many in disarray. There are rusty metal edges everywhere. Hughes called my attention to the fact that the water cans were designed for a dual purpose: to hold water and to be used as commodes, the instructions clearly printed with white letters on the outside.

  On my previous visit to Organ, on 4 November 2014, my single object of interest was this shack. Morgan guided my husband, two small daughters and me from the park office and gift shop down to the Chapel Room and to the wooden structure. My oldest daughter, Andrea, had her own flashlight, and she willingly posed in pictures for scale, a common practice in cave photography. Looking back at the images, the juxtaposition of her innocence and playfulness against the backdrop of the shelter and its rusting supplies is jarring. I used my flashlight to peer inside as best I could. I was struck then, and then again a year later, by the apparent flimsiness of the structure. It was not even fully sealed, the cave itself providing the floor and roof. The wooden planks had gaps between them. I imagined Army Corps of Engineers staff rushing through a job that they may not have believed in, finding the notion of surviving in this cavern, with no way of keeping radiation out, a ridiculous exercise. I have not met any of the workers who were at the Organ Cave site, but I did meet a caver whose job was to identify potentially suitable caves for the purpose of retrofitting them as civil defense shelters out in Virginia in the early 1960s. ‘It was the biggest waste of time. I thought it all such a stupid idea’, he said. ‘Then why did you do it?’ I asked. ‘Because I got paid for it’.

  Hughes agreed with this sentiment of wasted efforts, as did an increasing majority of cavers in the early to mid-1960s (Douglas 1996). Even after the leadership of their national organization, the National Speleological Society, had pushed the idea of using caves as civil shelters back in the early to mid-1950s, many members questioned the plan’s effectiveness and even need. Their critique focused, among other things, on the difficulty of containing caves, of cutting them off from their atmospheric and ecological flows that connect them to the broader environment around them. Increasing environmental awareness underscored the importance of this critique. But as cave historian Joseph Douglas explains, the original NSS leadership’s proposal of caves as fallout shelter ought to be seen within the context of a broader history of use of caves as private or political resource (Douglas 1996). Indeed, even as the cave manager’s critique underscored the wastefulness of government, she proudly displayed and helped preserve the rich national heritage of her cave. Not only did she display the trefoil plaque on one of the walls of her gift shop, she had, encased in glass, many historical artefacts (most of the Civil War) that have been found in the cavern. Among them were small pieces of the Civil Defense crackers that came from one of the cans left in Organ. ‘Do you want to try one? They taste like vitamins’, she told me. I bit into a small piece, wondering if this might be negligent of me, as at the time I was eight weeks pregnant. The dense, stale cracker had acquired the waxy taste of the parchment paper in which they had been wrapped for over half a century.

  CAVE AND BUNKER COUNTERPOINT … IN CONTEXT

  One of the values of engaging in this cave and bunker counterpoint is that it prods us to consider both places in relation to one another, both in time and space (as in Figure 7.1). Together, I think of how the Cold War, as did the Civil War 100 years prior, modified the Greenbrier landscape more broadly, both above and below ground. As Greenbrier Resort historian Robert Conte notes in his chapter on the bunker (and all bunker guides state as well), the resort was conveniently located within the relocation arc for government staff working in Washington, D.C. (Conte 2000). So was Organ Cave, as well as many caves in Virginia and West Virginia. What I find intriguing, however, is that despite commentary both by tour guides and the short documentary shown to visitors about the push to make fallout shelters around the country during the height of the Cold War, there is rarely any mention of Organ or other caves in the region during the Greenbrier bunker tour. Indeed, Conte did not know that Organ Cave had been a designated fallout shelter. Likewise, other writers who have published accounts of their bunker tour either do not mention or altogether ignore the ways the resort’s neighbouring underground landscape was included in the government’s vision or plan to survive a nuclear attack.

  In How We Forgot the Cold War (2012), Jon Wiener provides an overview of Cold War monuments across the United States to examine the ways the Cold War was memorialized. We understand that the Greenbrier bunker was for Congress and Organ Cave was for citizens, but in both cases we have fascinating opportunities to examine the ways private owners participate in the making of Cold War heritage (the Greenbrier bunker tour is run by the Greenbrier Resort, not by a federal agency such as the National Park Service). In Survival City (2010), Tom Vanderbilt acknowledges the joint effort of the US Army and Navy to ‘survey of suitable subterranean sites – in particular, natural caves – primarily in West Virginia’ but yet makes no other reference to caves in the book (2010, 129). Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger’s A Nuclear Family Vacation makes a brief reference to a ‘massive cave’ in Huntsville, Alabama, which was readied as part of the post 9–11 civil defense plans, but that is about it (2011, 155).

  Figure 7.1. Counterpoint: Greenbrier Bunker’s Door and Organ Cave Shelter’s Shack (2015, María Alejandra Pérez).

  What is it about certain Cold War sites that appear to draw so much attention, often overlooking other intriguing sites within the region that are clearly also part of the same Cold War landscape? I do not have an answer. In the case of this bunker and cave counterpoint, however, I will point out yet another way in which I see them as sharing a common denominator, a particular way in which they are both part of the same landscape. And that is that much of their materiality, the limestone that makes up their form, is all of local provenance. In both cases, limestone was moved and transformed, whether by water or truck. I put my hand on the walls of both bunker and cave, and I think of the many tiny seashells that make up deposits within this sedimentary rock. Much of it is organic, is it not? And perhaps the last word that would come to mind in the utilitarian and utterly unadorned space of the bunker is ‘organic,’ but in the timeline of deep history, it is worth thinking about the surprising, indeed jarring and surreal forms, we humans have opted to give the matter of our world.

  TRANSFORMATIVE REPEAT ENCOUNTERS

  I am trying to make sense of my relation to Organ Cave and the Greenbrier bunker, places I have visited repeatedly during the last three years that I have been a resident of West Virginia. They have been for me, sites of research that, in counterpoint, have sparked intriguing comparisons of the ways limestone and other earthy materials are moved and shaped through time. Always, for me at least, these sites have been in dialogue with each other as part of a broader physical and cultural landscape, but the realization of precisely how this plays out has revealed to me in parts, in bursts of intriguing discoveries with others that have shared my enthusiasm for these sites: the managers and guides, cavers, fellow bunkerologists (all o
f us here, in this very volume), my writer friend Will who has been obsessed with everything underground. At times, my enthusiasm is unabashed delighted, others it is dread. Often it is both (Holloway 2010; Geoghegan & Woodyer 2014). That first time in Organ gasping at the unexpected sight of human figures posing next to the saltpetre vats is still with me. So is the joy of being told, at the end of my third bunker tour, that we were free to go back to all bunker tour areas except those off limits to the public because they are now data storage sites. This meant I could go back to some of the intriguing stops along the tour, with my camera, and stop to touch walls, the cold metal doors, and snap countless photographs (specifically, photography is permitted in the Culinary Arts Center, which is the former government cafeteria, the Exhibit Hall, the East Tunnel and the entrance to the Exhibit Hall). Then, of course, the offer of tasting that cracker accepted. In every case, my enthusiasm grows for these places, their configurations, their histories in the presence of others, whether or not others share and validate my curiosity or question it with a quizzical look. But so grows the dread of these sites potential reactivation, the need again to think of having to hide away and live out the rest of one’s life underground, if lucky.

  There is something that is deeply personal about my enthusiasm for bunker and cave. Viewed as variations of material and symbolic configurations that have and continue to change – albeit in radically different rates – through time, bunker and cave are part of a broader landscape and history that has shaped the place I now call home, the state of West Virginia. As a Venezuelan immigrant who has lived in this foreign country since the age of 15, the constant challenge and need to develop a sense of place is a constant part of my life. A personal but also a common condition for many. Geographers and anthropologists have rightfully focused on everyday dwelling practices in the places we inhabit to explain the ways we develop a sense of place, but what of our need to intensify and speed the process of home-making in a journey of repeated displacements? So perhaps this enthusiasm is more of a need to address the still unsettling experience of uprootedness, of spatial transience. Bunker and cave for me play the dual purpose of exposing the unique character of West Virginia while at the same time promising repeat experiences of exploration and discovery as I slowly uncover their intriguing and leaky secrets.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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  Conte, Robert. 2000. The History of the Greenbrier: America’s Last Resort. Charleston: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Inc.

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  Coronil, Fernando. 2000. ‘Towards a critique of globalcentrism: Speculations on capitalism’s nature’. Public Culture 12(2): 351–374.

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  Dasher, George. 2012. The Caves and Karst of West Virginia, The West Virginia Speleological Survey, Paper No. 19. Barrackville: West Virginia Speleological Society.

  Douglas, Joseph. 1996. ‘Shelter from the atomic storm: The National Speleological Society and the use of caves as fallout shelters, 1940–1965’. Journal of Spelean History 30(4): 91–105.

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  Chapter 8

  Recuperative Materialities

  The Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival

  J. J. Zhang

  Kinmen (or Quemoy) is a Taiwanese island situated within artillery range of mainland China; it became a military stronghold following bombardment at the start of the Cold War, with the fortresses, bunkers and underground tunnels carved through solid rocks testifying to the island’s geostrategic position as a bastion against ‘communist threat’. This chapter seeks to destabilize the often-perceived banality of the (im)material world around us, by exploring how a defunct military tunnel in Kinmen reincarnated into a stage for musical performances and a place of material recuperation in a post-conflict society. It draws on insights from research on therapeutic landscape and materiality studies to see how both fields of scholarly enquiries complement each other in our engagement with bunkers as repositories of memory, loss and trauma.

  Covering an area of 150 km2 and a population of 72,000, Kinmen is located 350 km southwest of Taipei, Taiwan, but a mere 8 km from the city of Xiamen in mainland China (Figure 8.1). The island became a frontier of the Kuomintang’s (KMT) Nationalist Army after its forces retreated to Taiwan during the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1949. Initial attempts by the communists to capture Kinmen were thwarted by KMT’s victory in the Kuningtou Battle on Kinmen later that year. The onset of the global Cold War and the American doctrine of containment further acted as deterrence to the communist’s plans for invasion. However, the First and Second Straits Crisis in 1954 and 1958, respectively, saw the PLA and the KMT engaging each other in fierce artillery battles at Kinmen. As a result of these events, a robust network of bunkers and underground tunnels burgeoned to provide shelters for KMT’s men and military supplies. Crucially though, intervention by the United States denied the prospect of a takeover.

  Figure 8.1. Location of Kinmen (2017, J. J. Zhang).

  Since the abolition of the martial law in 1992, Kinmen has experienced gradual de-militarization. In 2008, improvement in cross-strait ties under the Ma Ying-jeou’s administration saw the opening of Taiwan to direct charter flights from mainland China. Nevertheless, Kinmen is often the first port of call for Chinese tourists who are en r
oute to taking cheaper domestic flights to mainland Taiwan. Owing to its strategic location, Kinmen once again finds itself at the centre of cross-strait relations, but this time, rapprochement tourism takes centre stage. Underground tunnels and other defunct military infrastructures became valuable tourism resources. Amid this cultural-geopolitical climate, the Zhaishan Tunnel sees itself hosting the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival to foster rapprochement between China and Taiwan. This chapter tells the story of the reincarnation of Zhaishan Tunnel, and does so not to add on to existing, and conventional, ‘grand’/‘high’ historical narratives of the Cold War or of its ending, but instead to show through a situated case study how, innovatively, a post-conflict society can be forged through the materialities of the recent past (González-Ruibal 2008). It does so in two ways. First, it responds to calls for new experimentations with the potentialities of materiality (Anderson & Tolia-Kelly 2004) by analysing the afterlife and possibly reincarnation of a defunct military infrastructure. This dovetails well with the argument that theories of tourism tend to be object-poor in that they devote much attention to ideas and practices, but relatively little to engagements with materiality. As Franklin (2003, cited in van der Duim 2007, 150) posits, ‘Tourism is no doubt a social activity, but it cannot be reduced to the social because it is relationally linked to a wide variety of objects, machines, texts, systems, non-humans, spaces and so on, without which it would not happen and could not have become what it is’. Second, rapprochement tourism is more than meets the eye – scholars of therapeutic landscapes have encouraged us to go beyond visual-centric analyses and engage with other ‘sensory modalities’ (Rose 2012, 1383). As such, I will interrogate the various ways in which the commemorative materialities of the tunnel stimulate the other senses in order to gain a more intimate understanding of cross-strait sentiments.