The Oldest People I Ever Met text stamped onto wall approx. 5x18 inches
Last semester I realized that painting pieces about my experiences overseas limited me in what I could get across. Therefore, I decided to explore these feelings in writing. I have found that I'm getting more and more comfortable with confronting some of the tough stuff, and I feel good about that.
Much like the act of sanding in my wood pieces, stamping each letter into the wall with the reinforced steel metal stamp is a meditative act that demands discipline and concentration. As the hammer strikes the metal pin, an echoed, pounding sound bounces off the walls and reminds me of the usually off-target, intermittent indirect fire that was periodically lobbed onto the bases we occupied. A little reminder that they hadn't forgotten about us.
The subject of these works is the loss of innocence. We soldiers certainly lost a fair amount of ours as the bulk of us were just kids in our own right and had never seen any combat. But we weren't the only ones growing up. I guess everyone was gets older fairly quickly in places like that, but the children over there really had to grow up fast. I felt they had decades on all of us.
I haven't studied enough poetry to understand how best to write these passages. I'm hoping to go to a workshop at some point through the Veterans Writing Workshop (http://veteranswriting.org/) in DC to tweak them and get some other ideas going about ways to tackle this subject matter within the medium of writing literature.
However, there were some things that I tried to keep in mind while making these like how the text is basically invisible until you get right up to it; the lack of punctuation and what how that effects the read of it; the font and the connotations it might have (this is pretty subtle, but if you've had dog tags before, then you might recognize it); and the way in which the lines are broken up to affect the pace of the read. I also wanted the tone of them to be somewhat matter-of-fact; to be dry and distant. I think this does two things a) it pits a sympathy in the reader for these kids' plight against a seemingly unsympathetic disconnectedness in the author and b) it uses the same simple vernacular that we used overseas. By the end of our tour a lot of us were pretty disillusioned about the true nature of man, about our "good guy" status, and all of that and ultimately it affected everything; even the way we communicated. Sentences got short and to-the-point with plenty of cursing to drive the point home. And dwelling on things or "bitching and moaning" didn't really help, so you speak your piece and then kindly "shut the fuck up". No one wanted to hear you verbalize what they were trying not to think about. In the short term, it's a pretty effective system. But over time it eats you up.
The reproduction of these passages may be difficult to decipher, so below you'll find what they say. However, it's important for me to point out that the high contrast black-and-white nature of the font below is antithetic to what I tried to do in the actual work. It being a pain in the ass to read on the wall is an important part of the concept of this piece.
The passage on the left reads:
THE OLDEST PEOPLE I EVER MET
WERE THESE THREE IRAQI KIDS
NONE OF EM COULD HAVE BEEN MORE
THAN 12 YEARS OLD BUT THEY HAD
EONS IN THEIR EYES
THEY WOULD SELL US EVERYTHING
UNDER THE SUN – PORN SADDAM-ERA
UNIFORMS LOOTED ROMAN COINS-
THEY DEALT IN IT ALL AFTER WE
PULLED OUT OF THE BASE THEY
CALLED HOME THEY WERE DISPATCHED
AND IF THEY DIDNT SEEM SO
ANCIENT I WOULD SAY THEY
DIED TOO YOUNG
The passage on the right reads:
DO CHILDREN NEED THEIR HEADS
TURNS OUT THEY DO
THEY USE THEM TO PICK SIDES
FOR SOME REASON THEY PICKED OURS
THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING