No Greater Honor: Sinking Resources into the Gulf of America

In recent years, communities along Florida’s Gulf Coast have dedicated significant financial resources to underwater monument and memorial construction. Often couched in greenwashed talking points of ecological remediation, these projects are big business. Local governments anticipate annually reaping millions of tourism dollars by positioning the region at the forefront of a new national memory landscape. Rather than sinking limestone blocks or repurposed infrastructural remainders to make artificial reefs, these projects mobilize objects with military resonance. Okaloosa County’s Poseidon Memorial Reef combines geometric columbarium architecture with broadly classicized sculptures. While lacking the literalism of Pinellas County’s Circle of Heroes, project sponsors plan for a monumental sculpture dedicated to wounded veterans and hired the Legion Undersea Services, which recruits special operations veterans, as the primary contractor. Okaloosa County will also soon sink the SS United States to make the world’s largest artificial reef. Although a leisure ship during its active years, the vessel’s commission is tied to military legacies, with online communities already comparing the boat’s arrival to Lee County’s Veterans Memorial Reef, anchored by the USS Mohawk. As these installations are planned for the “Gulf of America,” a nominal shift with territorial claims, this paper attends to piecemeal planning of this chain of underwater memorials as expanding military presence along national borders. Rather than the northern and southern borders that become staging grounds for defense theater, this paper directs attention to coastal margins and the objects sited there as perpetuating the presence of and ongoing service to a national military body.