Quantico museum to let visitors experience life as marines.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

The Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, in partnership with the Marine Corps, is building a new museum that will use the latest electronic technology to help visitors understand more clearly what it means to be a Leatherneck.

The facility--to be called the National Museum of the Marine Corps--is under construction on a 135-acre site just off Interstate 95 and adjacent to the service's base in Quantico, Va.

When it opens in 2006, the $41 million museum will have close to 60,000 square feet of exhibits designed to immerse guests in the day-to-day life and history of the Marines, explained Bill Ruggieri, the project's senior exhibit designer at Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, of Boston, Mass.

As they enter the museum, visitors will pass through an orientation theater, featuring an introductory film about the history of the Corps. Then, they will move to a replica of a recruiting station and board a bus. In the bus windows, television screens transmit Marines' stories of their trips to boot camp.

When they leave the bus, visitors will hear drill instructors shouting orders from overhead, surrounding speakers. Other aspects of recruit training will be recreated accurately, including a graduation march to the Marines' Hymn, Ruggieri said.

From boot camp, attendees will enter the central corridor of the museum, cared the Fast Track, Rugqieri explained. Designed for visitors with limited time, the Fast Track presents a capsule history of the service, from its birth in 1775 to the present.

Visitors can explore Marines' roles in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. In the World War II gallery, for example, visitors will witness landing on Iwo Jima...