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Serving in combat with a military unit can cause emotional scars that take years to heal – if they ever do. Many veterans continue to search for ways to work through their experiences in a positive way. Texas Public Radio’s Terry Gildea introduces us to a project that encourages vets to channel those emotions into the creation of visual art.
December 4, 2009 · Drew Cameron served four years with an Army field artillery unit out of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and deployed to Iraq at the beginning of the war.
“I was sent overseas to Iraq in 2003 – second wave of the invasion – I was there from April 7 to December 3. So, just a touch over eight months."
When Cameron left the Army, he started experiencing anxiety and symptoms of depression that he attributed to his combat experiences in Iraq. Over the next several years he became more angry and withdrawn, until he began working with fellow vet and paper artist Drew Matott in Burlington, Vermont. Cameron was able to channel his emotions and free himself from an enormous amount of pain.
“It was a natural progression from being numb, from feeling isolated, from not wanting to talk about the military experiences that I’d had to facing them – to making art about that,” said Cameron.
Soon the collaboration between Cameron and Matott grew into the Combat Paper Project , a national effort to get vets to explore their experiences through the art of paper making. Cameron recently led a workshop at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio. He asked vets to bring in old military uniforms.
“These are some dress shirts from the Air Force and dress pants. This is a remnant of an old desert night-time camouflage from the first Gulf War,” said Cameron.
Those uniform parts were crushed and broken down in a giant steel vat to make pulp used to create paper.
“So, here they’re pulling sheets of paper from their uniform items and rendering images in a technique that we call pulp printing. So taking poetry, writings or images and photographs from different experiences and points in time, and using a stencil and printing those images on the white sheet of paper.
Cameron says he encounters veterans in the workshop from almost all of the wars fought by U.S. forces in the last fifty years.
“You see a lot of veterans even from the Vietnam era who have gone years and years and years trying to bury those things and the pain and the hurt and the anger and whatnot, and they’re still trying to come back to some sort of sense of purpose,” said Cameron.
One of the Veterans participating in the San Antonio workshop was Mary Anne Johnson who served as a nurse in a field hospital in Vietnam. She struggles with the image of young soldier she took care of who had a complete mental breakdown from battlefield stress.
“Two of us took him the shower and bathed him because he just couldn’t function at all in any way, shape or form. And after five days he was still catatonic. Even with medication and all the therapy, talking to him and everything, he never spoke to us in the whole five days. And we sent him right back to the states, and I never know what happened to him and I never know where he ended up,” said Johnson.
Johnson spent the week writing poems about her experience with the young soldier and transcribing those words on the paper she made in the workshop.
“It has allowed me to use these in a positive way and then to just let go of it. So, that I don’t have to wonder where he is anymore. I know that wherever he ended up, he must be okay. In my mind. He may not be, but in my mind he’s okay,” said Johnson.
Drew Cameron hopes the Combat Paper Project can continue to provide an outlet for vets looking to separate themselves from their battlefield experiences and find some sense of peace.
“I’m comfortable with identifying as a veteran but it’s not what identifies me. It’s a part of my history, of my character, of who I am. I can’t even imagine what my life would be like had I not been able to begin the long, hard process of coming home,” said Cameron. |
