 We're so fortunate to have Craig Webner with us tonight. We are part of the Smithsonian affiliate program, and it's through this program that we're able to have Craig here with us tonight. To kind of the loss is faced in many parts of the world, especially recently, for those of you who have probably seen it on the news, how my reserve being one of those sites, a new program was embedded in early October, creating a new reserve unit as part of an agreement between the Smithsonian Cultural Resource Initiative and the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command for Craig, which is part of what goes to tonight's talk. That's a good one. Craig has served as an officer in the U.S. Army Civil Affairs Corps. Our last assignment was as an arts, monuments, and archives officer in Iraq. To that end, Craig is responsible for the recovery of items moved in the beginning in 2003 from the Iraqi National Museum. For those of you who saw our postcard and poster, the mask that's on there is one of those pieces that Craig helped recover. Craig is an art historian and worked as a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for 13 years. In 2010, Craig served as an international project coordinator for the Smithsonian's Hating Cultural Recovery Project, reserving more than 30,000 objects of patient heritage after the 2010 earthquake. In 2012, she became director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, an outreach program to train and support cultural heritage professionals, first responders, and military working in heritage disaster risk management and response. Projects have included assistance for cultural heritage in New York after Hurricane Sandy, and emergency training workshops for cultural heritage professionals from Mali, Iraq, Syria, Nepal, and other countries experiencing disasters. And having had dinner with Tarana being all talked about this afternoon, the work that everybody's doing as part of this reserve unit is absolutely fascinating. I think you'll enjoy tonight's discussion. So please help me welcome Craig. I'd like to thank the museum and the university for welcoming me and giving me a chance to look around the gorgeous campus today and the fantastic museum, the exhibition that's going up in there right now looks fascinating. I wish I could be here for the opening of that. And also to the Smithsonian affiliates, because not only do they help with working with programming for museums across the country, but they're also really active in helping us with our disaster work. Whenever disasters strike across the United States, we look to the affiliates to tell us to reach out to the museums in the area to let us know whether or not museums have been impacted. And they're kind of the tendrils that go out to the larger community so that we can learn what other types of cultural heritage has been impacted. So I really thank them as a partner. And there are an increasing number of military museums, I think, who've become affiliates. And so that's really interesting to me too, because what I am most interested in and all of my disaster work has to do more with the military and their understanding of cultural heritage and the impact that it has on communities and countries when that heritage is damaged and especially in times of armed conflict. So my talk tonight is Beyond the Monuments Men. So I think a lot of people know a little bit about the Monuments Men from the Monuments Men film back in 2014, the book and some other books. But today's armed conflicts also require this kind of care. And this is a picture of us doing some training at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago for a group of Monuments Men and we kind of have to go beyond that. So in this new unit that was just mentioned as part of that. So I'll talk a little bit about that tonight too. But first of all, as was mentioned earlier, I'm pretty much a sort of geeky art historian working on decorative arts, furniture, silver, ceramics, and was happily living my life at the Minneapolis Institute of Art doing fun exhibitions and things like that. It's a fantastic museum. If you haven't been, it's in the heart of Minneapolis and an encyclopedic art museum collection, one of the best in the country. But all this time working there, I had a secret identity, which was as an Army Reserve Officer. I joined the Army Reserves right out of high school. I enlisted back in the long time ago when we could be all you could be and all that good stuff. As a way to pay for college, but also because my grandfather was in World War II, he never left the United States, but he still had great stories. And we still watch John Wing movies together on Sundays back in Missouri. And so I joined and then I went through the ROTC program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and met my husband there. And I convinced him to leave the National Guard and come over to the dark side of the Army Reserve. And we were both quartermaster officers for a long time. And then in the first Gulf War, we both deployed. And I got stuck counting Patriot missiles in Germany. And when I came home, which was a pretty good tour, my husband was in Saudi Arabia for a year. But when I came home, I said, we're going to do something different. I want to join the Civil Affairs Corps. And he said, what in the heck is that? But I did convince him. And while I was studying political science and art history in my master's programs at the University of Kansas, I discovered the interesting story of the monuments then. And so that kind of drove me on to try to do more to develop within the branch. I'm like, why don't I hear about this today? Where's the doctrine regarding our responsibilities under the Head Convention? And so after a while of knocking on doors and asking around, I was told, we did this during World War II. This isn't really a thing. We have to worry about it anymore. So just worry about your own job. And we don't do training on this. We have a few experts. You're one of them. But we won't worry about it. And then along comes 2003 and the invasion of Iraq. And I was concerned about it the whole time thinking, you know, there's such important cultural heritage sites there. But I'm sure we've got it covered. I can understand how, you know, we have no strike list. And I know that there's a civil affairs command there. Meanwhile, I was set to go to Afghanistan. And then one day I'm sitting on my couch in Minneapolis and I see on television, I was watching the morning briefings from SETCOM on a regular basis. And I see this terrible looting of the Iraq Museum. And so I started to call around and I said, hey, I'm a museum curator. Is there something I can do? And I got the attention of one of my former commanders that I deployed to Bosnia with as during the peacekeeping mission with NATO a few years earlier. And by then he was the commander of all the U.S. Army civil affairs. And he said, yes, we would really like you to come and join the 352nd Civil Affairs Command in progress. Please immediately pack your bags, do not pass go, come to Fort Bragg, get processed, and we're going to send you straight to Baghdad. And so that's where I found myself sort of in May of 2003, just weeks after the looting of the museum and working directly with the staff. And that's not an easy thing. Walking in uniform and saying, hi, I'm from the government. I'm here to help you sort of thing. And saying we understand that what happened was a terrible tragedy for the staff here. I also work at a museum and so I kind of can understand what you're going through. If this had happened at my museum, I would be devastated. A lot of people, the staff at that museum had spent their whole lives researching those collections. It's the flagship museum for the whole country of Iraq. Everything that's excavated in the country is cataloged there. And then many times had been returned back to regional museums. And this was one of the tragic things is that during the First Gulf War, many of those regional museums where objects from excavations, and remember this is thousands of year old heritage and you pretty much can't throw a stone without hitting an archeological site there. And so many of those museums though had been looted during the First Gulf War and by the locals during a period of instability, even under Saddam there were periods of instability. And so many of those museums sent their collections to the National Museum in Baghdad for safe keeping and then they were looted or damaged. So I found myself suddenly trying to work with the staff that had a pretty low level of trust in a lot of ways. And to try to convince them, you know, this is civil affairs. We have a duty to help you. And I had only a few people on my team to do that. So I want to talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. But first you can't really tell the story of what happens here without going back to the monuments men and women of World War II. And as we know the story of World War II, the Nazis had set their sights on looting the cultural patrimony of Europe. Hitler was a disappointed artist. He did not get into art school in Vienna. The world would be very much different if he had, I think. And so he had set his sights on building his own Führer Museum in Linz, Austria, his hometown. It was going to be the greatest museum ever. And he needed to loot a lot of art in order to get that. And so he set about doing that. Meanwhile, art that didn't suit the taste of the regime of that time was considered degenerate art. And they had exhibitions and burnings and book burnings and destructions. And then some of it got sold on the market, right? It might have been degenerate. They didn't want it for the Führer Museum or other German museums. But they knew it was quite valuable on the international market. And they sent things to auction. They sent it through shady dealers. And they were able to sell a lot of that looted art to get money back into the Third Reich that they wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. And you see a pattern here. This is the kind of stuff that happens today when cultural heritage goes missing and gets looted by bad actors. And then museums of Europe also recognizing the danger that was coming. Many of them took the initiative to go ahead and put their collections into storage for safekeeping. This is a gallery in the Louvre. It's so hard if you've been to the Louvre to imagine that they literally cleaned out the galleries and put things in storage all around the outskirts of Paris and various chateaus and storage areas. In Italy, they packed up and bricked up and evacuated whole collections from museums all across Italy and put them in secret storage locations. And in many cases, this really wasn't the work of the government because what's wrong with that? Governments don't necessarily always like it if the staff, who oftentimes you're working for the Ministry of Culture, part of the government, if those staff show that they don't have confidence that the museums can protect themselves, that the government can protect them, that's a bad thing. So a lot of times this stuff had to be done in secret, right? And then many colleagues working in the cultural heritage field in Europe also had become involved in trying to develop protective measures and started to make manuals. How do you do this? This is one of my colleagues, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Perberk, who is the head of the new UK Monuments Officer Unit, found this fabulous guide in one of the collections when he was doing some research and sent me this image of that. But how do you do this kind of work when you're preparing? This is the British Museum on the right, which was directly hit by several bombs. They had evacuated their collections to various areas on the outskirts outside London and even clear up to the north in Wales, luckily. But they did have a lot of damage of larger objects that could not be moved. Even here in the United States, especially after what happened with Pearl Harbor, we started to realize the dangers. And museum directors had an emergency meeting in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not long after Pearl Harbor, and they said, what should we be doing to protect American collections? But they also made the decided, the really important decision that the museums had to remain open. They had to be available to the public because we were going to war, and they wanted those collections to be a respite for Americans and for service people because they wanted them to be able to have access to their culture. And I still think that's a very important decision they made. But on the side, in sort of secret, they also evacuated collections. So the National Gallery of Art, which had just opened to the public just before World War II, decided to evacuate very quietly, sort of, I think, the top 100 of their most important collections, and they put them on a train and they sent them to Biltmore out in the mountains of, I think it's North Carolina, right, North Carolina. Good work if you can get it. The curators got to go along and live at Biltmore through the duration of the war to take care of the collections. And you can still, if you go to Biltmore now, you can see the room where they actually gathered all the crates and this room and they have a really nice, at least last time I was there, they had a nice panel about how they housed the collections from the National Gallery of Art. Even the Smithsonian sent some of their most important collections to a facility in the Smoky Mountains and things that were considered the national treasures of America went there in order to make sure they were protected. In this case, bombing was ever actually able to reach the East Coast. And so this idea that we needed to help our colleagues in Europe started around this same time. The museum directors of the world or of the United States, as I said earlier, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Fog Museum at Harvard University, all thought, we're leaders in this, we're going to gather the museums together to see what we can do to protect our own collections, but how can we help our colleagues over in Europe? We know that what they're going through, and they'd already been going through this for several years even before the U.S. entered the war. And so they had been spending a lot of time trying to convince the U.S. government that there needed to be some kind of expertise for the military to understand where these collections were, how to map them. Many of them remembered the terrible damage done to cultural collections during World War I. And so over time, they began to be successful at this attempt. The Army wasn't concerned about it, of course. And General Eisenhower said, look, if we're going to do this, if we're going to have these cultural advisors, they're not going to be these guys. They're going to be soldiers, and they're going to be in uniform, and I am going to have command over them. That was kind of the bargain, right? The Roberts Commission, which was called the Roberts Commission because one of the justices of the Supreme Court was put in charge of the commission by the president. And they would say, okay, these are my, Paul Sacks was a professor. He knew where his former students were serving. Most of these people were already serving in the military in one way or the other, in the infantry, in armor, in all these various places, and they needed to find them and pull them together. And that's one of the things that's tough about the Monuments Men movie because there's a little bit of an impression that all these people were kind of came off the street or came directly out of the museum and joined the military, but several of them were already in the military. And they're not quite as maybe a handsome bunch as George Clooney and Matt Damon and Kate Blanchett. But nevertheless, they were really important to saving the world's cultural heritage and especially nobody more than George Stout. There's a new film about George Stout's life called Stout-hearted, put out by an independent documentary company. A couple made the film there from Iowa from the same town as George Stout was from. And he was really the father of the science of art conservation, one of the very early experimenters on the way that time and different materials reacted to the weather and to conditions within museums. And he also experimented with looking at how bombing would impact museums. He gave people a lot of advice. He'd served in World War I, stayed in the Navy Reserve the entire time between the wars. And he had this idea of what they could do. He was working at Harvard University. He was working with Paul Sacks to try and figure out how could we create these monuments, units that could go in with the divisions as they move forward and try to protect sites. And he felt like he wasn't being listened to and that it wasn't ever going to happen. So he went ahead and joined at 40 plus years old. He went to the Navy, take me, put me wherever you want to. And so he was testing paint, methods of painting ships here in the United States when he finally got the call, okay, we're going to do this monuments men thing. James Rormer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was serving as an infantry officer when they came and pulled him out. He later went on to become director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several years. People like Paul Gardner, this guy was no spring chicken and he enlisted in the military in order to help them with the monuments men program. And Lawrence Sickman, U.S. Army, I love that he was a curator of Chinese art and he helped a lot with the Pacific Campaign and information about saving cultural sites there. So what do they do? Well, meanwhile back home, organizations like the American College of Learned Societies, ACLS, which still exists today, I actually have an ACLS fellow working in my office. And working with the Frick Museum, Harvard University and Yale University and other groups, created maps so that pilots would understand as they were flying their missions where these places were located. And it wasn't always that successful. If you remember the movie, there's a moment where Matt Damon says, so you're asking me to go be in a unit and tell guys what not to hit. It's like basically, yeah, that's it. It wasn't always easy, but they made these fantastic guides and this one is from the collection at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. They have actually a quite large collection of monuments men, memorabilia, especially from Stout and from several of, actually like six or seven of the monuments men gave their papers to the Smithsonian. This is actually quite oversized folio of maps of France that they could use during the invasion. They also did direct assistance missions in the wake of actual military activity in the towns as they were going through Italy, going through France. The monuments men would come along and try to do damage assessment reports. They went to the local authorities, asked where they could help, and this is an evacuation of a really important religious sculpture from a church in France. They also had the tough job of telling military where they could be and where they couldn't be. It's so inviting to go and have your billets in a palace or a castle when really in order to protect these places they should not be used for a military purpose and plus soldiers and Marines are kind of messy and they have a tendency to maybe leave things not as nice as when they got there. So they had the responsibility for putting up these out of bounds off limit signs all over the place but luckily they had the backing of the supreme Allied commander right there at the bottom of the page. Most of the time it worked. And then they also had the really difficult mission. After the fighting was over they were left with these caches of art that the Nazis had looted plus German art from German museums legitimately stored in these salt mines and warehouses that needed to be protected so that they could be restituted back to their places of origin. So not only did they need to protect German art they needed to find the art that had been looted from all around Europe and try to get it back to the origin. We're still working on this today right museums are still researching the collections that they've acquired since World War II we have an ethical guideline that says we have to do provenance research on our collections to see if they might have belonged to a family who lost them through looting or through forced sales and things like this. So this is an issue and it's still impacting museums today and this is Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton all the generals are discovering these paintings stored in a salt mine this is the very same day that they for the first time visited a concentration camp that had been liberated so Eisenhower and the generals had a very tough day that day and learning that they had hundreds of thousands of objects that needed to be done and all the monuments men and women from all the allies were less than about 300 people in a war that included millions and millions of people this is a durr portfolio down in a salt mine a Rembrandt this is some of the German art stored and if some of well it's not a very good picture but some of you might recognize Neuschwanstein Castle in the background and this is where a lot of the in the movie Rose Valland, Kate Blanchett tells James Röhrmer this is where the Nazis had stored the French art that they stole lots of art from French collections were stored here and James Röhrmer's job was to bring it back to France and so we have monuments men restituting excuse me of course I didn't bring my water restituting these works of art to countries around the world and then it was the responsibility of those countries to find out to send them back to their true owners thank you Joe and we can go to Krakow today to Poland to see Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Urban because it was restituted back to its country of origin then so it's really exciting when you work in museums and especially around the time of the monuments men movie a lot of museums who had a lot of provenance research that they could share with the public on their collections because what would often happen is that these families would get this work of art back and then they would legitimately sell it back on to the market to get the money because they needed the money and then you know wealthy Americans would go to Europe in the 50s and 60s and purchase it and then it legitimately later got given to a museum and so museums that have done their homework have this amazing history or provenance of the ownership of that object that they can share and it's really exciting the first time you turn around a painting and you see the swastika painted on the back and you go wow this was looted it was returned and then it was sold through the market to become on the wall of this museum and I think it's really important that museums try to tell those stories why is this object here how did we acquire it so what lesson did that teach us there were already rules against the pillaging of cultural property and against the intentional destruction of civilian property which also includes cultural property but it seemed as though it was not strong enough and it was basically part of the big law of war like the head conventions of 1899 and 1907 so in the 50s drawing on the lessons of World War II and the successes of the monuments of men and women of World War II who by the way kept working on that restitution until the 1950s some people worked on that until about 1953 so the countries of the world got together and they decided to create a new law of war treaty the 1954 head convention and I'm not going to bore you to reading all this out loud but basically the head convention defines what is cultural property and goes through basically everything you can think of museums and their contents libraries, archives scientific collections which sometimes we forget and any kind of repository where this type of material is gathered together and saved it also sets out some guidelines for how to protect cultural property and the really important one I think because it applies to both the civilian world museums and cultural heritage caretakers and the military is that we have to prepare during peacetime to protect cultural property if there's a possibility of war and each country is left to their own determination of how they do this but it means that we have to make plans for emergencies and all kinds of disasters including the possibility of armed conflict even in countries like the United States or France or Germany because it's possible that it could happen or terrorist attacks are very similar the kind of protective measures you take will be similar and the article 4 is that we'll respect the cultural property of other countries and we'll refrain from using cultural property for a military purpose it might seem like a great idea to build a military base close to a cultural site or you might not have a choice because it's in the center of the city and some things are military in these city centers but as much as possible you refrain from using it for a military purpose and then there is an out this protection is not absolute there's a military necessity exception which I think is really important when you're trying to work with the military because no one would ever say you have to send soldiers to their death in order to protect a cultural site if that site and this is what Eisenhower said to his commanders your men's lives are infinitely more important and if the cultural site has to go it has to go but make that decision with an informed mind and it better not be for your convenience let it not mask laxness or convenience so you also have to prohibit and prevent theft, pillage, or misappropriation from our own troops hence the off-limits signs and things like that and training and then it's also absolutely prohibited and this is an absolute that you can't have reprisals against cultural property you hit me and kill a bunch of my guys so I go blow up your museum that's absolutely prohibited under the head convention and then finally military measures which is a little bit of what I want to talk about the monuments men is that we're supposed to each country in more than a hundred and thirty countries now that are part of the head convention we agree that we'll train our own military and have military regulations to inform them about the things I just said that we agreed we won't strike cultural property without a military necessity etc. and the monuments men are enshrined really in this second paragraph that we will plan or establish within the armed forces services are specialist personnel whose purpose is to secure respect for cultural property and to cooperate with the civilian authorities responsible for safeguarding it because if you read the notes from those conferences that created the head convention they said hey this worked we had people in uniform sitting around the table during staff meetings they weren't excluded and left out and they were able to assert you know these are the things that need to be protected and this will benefit us if we do it the head convention also created the international symbol for cultural property protection the blue shield symbol and here you see it used in a couple different places this left one is on the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna Austria and the one on the right is on the roof of the National Museum back in 2003 so the symbol is an international symbol and the Geneva and Hague conventions go together as the law of war so the blue shield is to the Hague convention what the red cross is to the Geneva conventions so for the Iraq Museum it's like okay we have a treaty 1954 Hague convention what happened we had things happen like the intentional destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas the intentional destruction of cultural sites in Bosnia during the Bosnian conflict literally places in Bosnia that were marked with the blue shield symbol were deliberately sought out by serve forces targeted with main tank guns and pulverized to the ground so they literally used the blue shield as a target and that's what happened why does this continue to happen and fast forward to the looting of the Iraq Museum and here we are we've got an armed conflict with instability you have a lot of angry people seeing maybe some of these cultural sites as part of the Iraqi government as part of Saddam's stuff not our stuff you have opportunists you have actors who think oh if I ever get a chance to loot that museum my sister used to work there or what have you people with insider information tell museums often lose things it's usually some kind of form of somebody who knew their way around and so this was the case at the Iraq Museum as well so we had a lot of damaged material we had a lot of missing material thousands of objects no recent inventories had been under sanctions for many years and completely close to the public which also added to that feeling of people saying this isn't my heritage I've never been to this museum and this during the headlights major here trying to figure it all out and this was the grand sum total of the monuments people that we had with us we had a larger team but none of them had any museum or cultural property background Captain Wes Sumner who was a landscape archaeologist and he got pulled away to help the Iraq Zoo because we had lots of damage to the animals there animals were dying he was working with the non-profit organizations to save the animals and so I stuck with working at the museum and this is us on one of our missions to find cultural materials that were stored at the National Bank so working with the staff and the MPs we had a lot of returns we also got captures of a lot of fake material but little by little many thousands of objects came back over time but it's still a drop in the bucket to what was lost which was about 15,000 objects is our best bet there was a lot of working with the international community and with the coalition so who was in charge of the Ministry of Culture as part of the coalition provisional authority because the Italians are good at culture so my boss was an Italian ambassador he was an Arab specialist and spoke fluent Arabic which was handy but he was not a museum specialist and we had our days of argumentation over what the mission should be to try to help the Ministry of Culture as a whole and also to try to help the museum and then the guy on the right was a carabinieri officer so they have a special military police called the carabinieri for the protection of cultural patrimony and so we always had a few carabinieri around and they said well Cory of course your country failed to protect the cultural patrimony because you're so young you're so cute aren't you so young you can just see the ambassador patting me on the head practically and you've never ratified the 1954 Hecht Convention I was like what what do you mean and I thought of all people who should know about this how did I not know this it just stunned me so I started asking around about that meanwhile we had lots of projects to busy us this is the famous treasure of Nimrud one of the most important treasures of gold and ancient Mesopotamian artifacts in the world it's right up there with King Tutankhamen's treasure that was found safe and sound in the bank vault and we had a whole series of events that we had to do to repatriate that stuff to go back to the museum and to be documented and inventoried but it's just an unimaginable thing and I've been really fortunate to work with colleagues trying to do the recovery at the archeological site of Nimrud and you know really fully excavated so working on the Iraqi-Jewish archive recovery that material came back to the United States to be preserved and it's been on an exhibition tour ever since it is parts of it are planned to be returned to Iraq there's a whole negotiation going on about that now but if we hadn't brought them back to the US and freeze dried them they would have been destroyed forever in the secret police headquarters in Baghdad and most of the material was organic paper and skin and Torah scrolls and things like that so and I guess I want to go back and say if I look like a deer in the headlights there it's because I am I'm thinking how can I do something when I get home to try to help the Army to help civil affairs and to help the rest of our cultural heritage community not have this happen again what can we do and plus can we ratify the head convention so I found out there was an organization called the Blue Shield which supports the head convention much in the way the International Committee of the Red Cross supports the Geneva Conventions and so we created our own US committee and a lot of people helped do that the archeological community the museums, the archives the libraries, we all came together because you have to apply to have the international status of a committee and we set our first goal of getting the United States to ratify the head convention we found out that or I found out that we had helped draft it back in 1954 but the Senate never ratified it the President never sent it to the Senate to be ratified because we couldn't agree it was the Cold War the Department of Defense didn't want to do it so this is what we ended up doing and we started working on the lobbying effort to do this this was before I worked for the government and we worked really hard to talk to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the benefits of ratifying the convention I would like not to be in a situation where we're in a coalition and our coalition partners have all ratified the treaty we haven't and there was a lot of finger pointing the British also had not ratified and there was a lot of political turmoil in the UK over the looting of the Iraq Museum and damage to sites and so our argument was look this will make things easier when you're in a coalition and you're all part of the same law of war treaties you can have the same rules of engagement etc so we finally convinced everyone including the Department of Defense and in September 2008 the Senate voted yes to ratify and the president sent the treaty to UNESCO which is where the treaties administered in 2009 so I came to the Smithsonian not too long after that because in 2010 we didn't get to rest on our laurels very long in 2010 with the Haiti earthquake and as was mentioned earlier that's kind of the Smithsonian got very involved in disaster risk management and disaster response for museums and other cultural heritage so the Blue Shield and the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative both of whom I've worked for banded together and said we're going to do more to train militaries and especially Army Civil Affairs because it makes sense they still have the doctrine they still have the positions but they don't have very many people in today's all volunteer force you don't find very many art historians who say I want to join the Army so we have to grow our own right we have to train those folks and then we'll look around in the Army and see who else might be interested in joining us for this task so we trained everywhere from fancy places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art who have these amazing collections of Iraqi material this unit was getting ready to deploy to Iraq and I have given talks in the supply room of Army reserve units you see me surrounded by boxes of MREs there and I will talk to anybody who will listen even if it's you know two guys sitting there with cleaning their M16s I will talk to them about the head convention while they do it and what are we trying to what do they need to know what is beyond monuments men well we're no longer in these conventional force on force conflicts we're in an era of persistent conflict and we are dealing with a lot of our non-state actors and contrary to popular belief the law of war also applies to our non-state actors they don't have a government to make them do things and to punish them if they do it wrong but they are subject to the treaties and to the laws of war so we see all the sudden starting around 2011 2012-13 we see all these armed non-state actors Islamic extremists making moves against cultural heritage sites in Mali in Syria the destruction of Palmyra and many other sites in Syria the Nimrud archaeological site that I mentioned where that beautiful treasures from was one of the most complete ancient cities in the world and especially for the Assyrian era in Iraq this was the capital of the world at one time blown up destroyed and this is what we have today we're working as I said to try to salvage these pieces so that we can help the Iraqis put it back together the Mosul Museum very near and dear to my heart I'm leading a project to help Iraqis with the salvage there and it wasn't just the smashing up of statues they used high explosives everywhere inside the building most of the movable objects had been evacuated to the Baghdad Museum as I said back in 2003 and those are intact nobody looted those objects that were stored there but the things that couldn't be moved really monumental sculptures they literally used explosives to blow them into pieces so we're working on that that hole in the floor is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle but the good news is we went there with engineers and tested everything and the museum can be renovated so we're excited to work with them and then just this idea of working to raise awareness cultural heritage professionals need to know more about what the military can do and how to train them and I teach classes on that to the cultural heritage community and I also teach the military and what we need to do is not preach right we need to give them a mission based rationale for what they do yes, clear down here at the bottom I say it's required but that's not the best argument starting at the top letting military personnel understand how the cultural heritage is tied to the human environment that they're working in and can be really important to understanding how not to lose the mission how not to have the population of Baghdad turn against you and they're seeing their heritage get damaged and looted etc these are really important lessons that we need to keep talking about over and over because it does keep happening over and over through history it supports governments right we don't have a ministry of culture here but most other countries do and we kind of ignored that oh, we have to staff a ministry of culture wait, we don't have that and we don't understand how bureaucratic don't museums just have rich donors and that's how they work most other countries don't do it that way avoid damaging PR what you don't want to see is the ancient site of Babylon home to most religions in the world know about Babylon we damaged it by building a helicopter landing pad on it and driving heavy trucks over fired brick walls ancient walls you want that positive narrative we protect civilians and their property the bad guys those ISIS guys they're the ones who destroy and providing them great information like this as you're building these no strike lists and helping them to understand this is the modern day equivalent of that France document that I showed you earlier we have these maps but now we have a really high tech way of transmitting this information and the Smithsonian and the blue shield and many universities have happily worked with colleagues at the defense intelligence agency to make sure that they have their coordinates right and that they share this with coalition allies more recently when there was this controversy over talking about Iranian sites that relationship became very strained universities we want to believe that their data is going to be used in a positive way to support the law of war and the hate convention so this is something we're going to have to talk about some more in the coming days but you know this is the kind of information that I think is important for civil affairs teams to have on the ground and use to inform their command we created some just in time materials for the retaking of Mosul to give information also for Raqqa and Derizor and they were used and then training training training so this is at the National Museum of American History this is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and we've done several of these over the years so this in a way and these are Marines we even train Marines and natural history specimens I don't know anything about preserving natural history specimens but my colleagues over at the National Museum of Natural History do and I saw a lot of these Marines eyes light up because they could relate to this a lot more than they could relate to maybe the paintings and then teaching them about their own history as I said the Archives of American Art has a lot of collections related to the World War II monuments men they did an exhibition at the time of the movie and that's George Stout there and the great big picture in the background of the real monuments men and women and to teach them about who came before this is Harry Utlinger that you saw with this picture of Rembrandt Harry unfortunately left us passed away a couple years ago I miss him very much but boy that guy could tell a story and then teaching them about the new experts that they have this is Scott DeGessie and we were fortunate to have some interest when the Smithsonian signed the memorandum of understanding with the use of CAPOC the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command because they want to strengthen this career field that they're responsible for and they're responsible by doctrine for having people like the head convention says who can give information to the rest of the force to the commanders on the ground and to work with the stakeholders he's the modern-day monuments man he's an artist he has a museum background he teaches at Texas Tech University Museum Program and he's really sort of like I teach him that he's the face of Civil Affairs now he's the new George Clooney so he and I are working together we have a big program coming up next month to do a week-long training for the 38 Golfs and what's the heck is a 38 Golf well it's the new program it's not really somebody said earlier it's a new unit and I would sort of say these are units that already exist but they're strengthening the program whereby they find experts in their various fields and cultural heritage is only one of the fields and we're going to be training cultural heritage experts we're going to have about 25 people come from most of them Civil Affairs already some of them are going before a board tomorrow to try to get a direct commission because they have education and civilian experience, their civilian jobs qualify them to join Army Civil Affairs and this training will be interdisciplinary across the Smithsonian it'll be some of it military some of it will be really basic stuff like how to hold an object somebody has that background maybe they're an archivist and I'm going to teach them how to hold an antique chair and they're going to teach each other because they're all experts in some area of cultural property but this is my moment when I hope the cadets are listening and thinking about their branches that they want to go into in the military and I want to put my hat on I'm also on the board of the Army Civil Affairs Association my pitch for why you should become a Civil Affairs Officer now you may have to wait a little while because it's a non-assission branch you have to branch another branch first whether it's infantry or quartermaster or what have you but then as a captain you can join Civil Affairs the 38 gulfs which are these Civil Affairs experts focus on governments so there are every kind of specialization that you would need if you were going to be an occupation force or a governance or provide advice on the civilian community there are people like jag officers and engineers and infrastructure experts and everything you would need if you were doing governance and they provide unique training experiences like coming to the Smithsonian to train but they're also working with corporations, other public private partners, academic institutions because they want to provide experiences for more than just the cultural heritage but for other parts of the 38 gulf new Civil Affairs expert MOS career specialty so that's my pitch any cadet who's interested in talking more about this I hope you'll contact me I'm at the Smithsonian WegenerC at si.edu and I'll put you in touch with this guy the face of Army Civil Affairs so that's my talk thank you very much for coming out on such a cold night and if anybody is listening at home thank you for listening at home a couple questions yeah I'm content to ignore the hate subjection by doing prevent bombings in Iraq Si I I wasn't too worried because I've been working I was in the military for 21 years I've been working with the military advising Civil Affairs doing training for another 17 years after my retirement so I know that the experts know what they're supposed to do and how they support the law of war so and then my next reaction was there's going to be a lot of media attention about this and so over the next 48 hours I think everybody in the country heard something about the head convention and I was very happy about that so it got a lot of people thinking about it and wanting to talk about the topic of how you protect heritage and war so I was happy about that there's another story about the Blacks who carry out these orders no of war you can refuse an illegal order now there would have to be a lot in between of discussion with leadership and everything but I don't think they would be obliged anybody else yes I teach in the Army ROTC department and I actually get a lot of questions about Civil Affairs from the cadets one of which is to go into Civil Affairs obviously they're not it's not a discussion but is there anything that Civil Affairs looks for in a branch that they would you know ascend into that looks more favorable for them to go into Civil Affairs yeah I think so when I first came into Civil Affairs I was studying political science and so that's a field all kinds of what my husband in Civil Affairs was a logistics expert because he in his civilian job was a food logistics broker and so all these kind of civilian occupations what Civil Affairs is looking for is somebody who does this in their civilian job and they're really good at it and they're sort of working in the field it's not enough to just have the degree and that's why it's a non-assession branch they want you to get out there get the experience of going in another branch and then also it's all in the reserve all these 38 golf positions there's about 400 of them they're all in the reserves and they're spread across reserve units all across the United States and as you may not know Civil Affairs doesn't really deploy by itself it deploys being attached like Civil Affairs command will deploy up at the division and higher and then the brigades go along with battalions go along with brigades etc so they attach on to other units and they serve as the G5 S5 so I hope that helps a little bit yes sir just thinking about how you plan and how in Civil Affairs do you have a pre-position expertise in possible areas of conflict is that something that is considered areas of the world where cultural heritage is really quite important either the East or the Middle East or other areas where there might be a conflict well again Civil Affairs would not deploy people by themselves so they'll be assigned to a command so I think the idea is more that they'll be in planning cells at the comms at the sent comm, south comm U comm etc and be able to but be aware there are only going to be about 20 of these cultural heritage professionals so the idea is that the Civil Affairs the whole force knows something that they're supposed to protect cultural heritage in armed conflict there are other people that are in that G5S5 know more and they may not be an expert but they know who to call and then if there is an actual military operation going on that they can bring somebody forward with the expertise they need and this is the key to this new program is their vetting and boarding people so they know exactly what their expertise is for some kind of museum person but that was about it and they're like go go go now they're being much more careful understanding people's expertise and hoping to deploy the right person to the right place at the right time I think I'm quoting Major General Guthrie the head of U.C.K.Pog just now I didn't mean to but I think I was can you tell the story that we told on the radio this morning about recovering that heritage are you my interviewer okay so the work ahead I didn't show a picture of it here but it's on the posters for the talk tonight and it was just that it's one of the most important objects at the Iraq National Museum it's thousands of years old it's the earliest known representation of a female face in history it's in all the art history 101 textbooks if you go just about anywhere and it was that was the number one object we had posters all over Baghdad looking for missing objects trying to get people because a lot of people took things in order to protect them as well and they did bring them back they're like oh I heard it's safe to bring things back well this didn't come back and so through a series of raids that the military police did in cooperation with the Iraqi police etc they were able to get a rumor that the work ahead had been taken and that was being hidden buried and I think it was at a farm and so they recovered it and I got a phone call one day in the palace my office was in the big palace of the foreheads in the green zone and this guy says hey I'm Captain Vance Cooner I'm the head of an MP unit and we think we found that head of workah thing and I go you mean the head of workah or the lady of workah you found it where is it safe and he's like oh so it's pretty important huh and I said oh yeah it's like one of the most important collections objects in the world and he said oh okay well I'll tell the boys to quit throwing it around out back like a football and I was like and he goes relax ma'am I'm kidding it's in the safe and I'm just calling to make an appointment to bring it back so that's that's the story and of course it was really remarkable recovery we had a whole press conference about it to show the world that it was safe any other questions over here in summer well like like any other overwhelming project you eat the elephant one bite at a time and I'm lucky to not have had to figure this out by myself obviously I'm a follower of conservators who have been figuring this out for years but I particularly worked when I started working on this clearback in 2003 I met an amazing woman named Aparna Tendon at the international conservation center in Rome and actually she hadn't even gone to work there yet but I met her at a conference about protecting cultural heritage and she said we've got to have some kind of procedure some kind of really clear guidelines on how you do salvage for these damaged places and she's from Kashmir right so she's been experiencing armed conflict her whole life and she's a conservator she trained at Harvard and has been all over the world so we started working on a program called first aid for cultural heritage in times of conflict and she helped develop a protocol and it's not hard it's not rocket science but it's basically treating these really damaged sites or museums like an archaeological site and you make a grid and you record everything very carefully when we went to the Muslim museum we had to be very careful because we knew it was a crime scene this is a law of war violation it's a war crime and so before we start picking pieces up we needed to be very careful that we document everything the way we saw it even knowing a lot of people had been through the reporters etc. and saving that documentation for the Iraqis if they should decide to have a war crimes tribunal and because once you screw that up you can't go back and so we did training with the FBI to learn how to do evidence collection and that's a whole other lecture but it's my passion right now and we're going to be doing some more training with them to try to teach more heritage professionals who are in those situations because everybody's afraid to touch things it's like what am I going to screw up how can I do this meanwhile you wait well we don't want people to have to wait we want we want both we want the evidence that can last 10 years till there's a tribunal and we want to save things now so that's how you do it one little bit at a time well I think that wraps it thanks very much again for all your good questions and for coming out tonight