by Ken Hruby

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

– Albert Einstein

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

– Charlie Parker

This essay was published in Volume 2 Issue 1 of Consequences: a literary magazine addressing war in the 21st century, Spring 2010, The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, UMass Boston,  George Kovach, editor

CNN’s latest news feed from Afghanistan brings the war right into my living room in high definition, on wide screen, in living color. The images are fresh, recorded a few hours ago from an isolated outpost near the Pakistan boarder. It is quite late there; machine guns mounted on Humvees fire tracers into the dark desert night. The incandescent arcs are all too familiar. In an earlier life I had been the one with his finger on the trigger. The job is given now to younger backs and hands, not yet worn down or worn out. Vietnam is forty years behind me, but the sight of those burning rounds streaming through the blackness is seared into my memory. I look at the tracers now, not with a the eyes of an infantryman, but with the eyes of a sculptor, and the beauty of those ballistic trajectories haunts me. My inspiration comes from the Muses now and not from Mars.

The transformation I made from soldier to sculptor was not a radical metamorphosis. I was an iconoclast as a soldier, a graduate of the United States Military Academy working on the radical fringes of the conservative military culture. I advocated legalizing pot but restricting booze on post. I saw the damage that “happy hours,”“prop blasts,” and “twenty-five cent shot nights” inflicted on both units and individuals; some became violent or abusive, and some couldn’t perform their duties. My ideas were not well received by the airborne colonels and generals who had come up through the ranks in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Today I stand on the conservative edge of the contemporary art world, and all I did was take a few half-steps to the left.

Somehow I completed the four years of engineering studies at West Point: Mechanics of Solids, Thermodynamics, Military Topography and Graphics. Very analytical. Very precise. Along with five hundred and thirty-three classmates, I became a competent problem solver and mastered the skills needed to soldier well for over twenty years. Now I apply those skills to making art.

For the most part, creative and intuitive activities, went begging at the Academy. If you wanted to express yourself creatively you had to find an extra-curricular activity. I chose the Glee Club which had a reputation for taking lots of trips away from West Point. We made annual appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and had other national television gigs. But nowhere in the Academy’s focused education were there any visual art courses or even clubs. The only recourse was to date an art history major from one of the co-ed colleges and pick up scraps of art education vicariously while having some fun along the way.

After graduation back-to-back tours in Korea and Vietnam pushed any thought of “self-actualization” off my priorities list. An old Army aphorism summed up the situation: “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your mission is to drain the swamp.”

Between my second and third “short” combat tours I was assigned to the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia as a machine gunnery instructor. The war in Vietnam was ramping up. From the Galloway ranges in the sandy pine forests east of the main post, our team ran two, sometimes three Infantry Training classes a week: scripted explanations of the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of the M-60 and 50 Caliber machine guns. We demonstrated firings from the bipod and tripod, range cards, care and cleaning, and both day and night firings. No Rambo shots from the hip. No cowboy stunts. The students were required to traverse and elevate the gun barrels in controlled bursts to engage multiple targets at various ranges and directions. Each class ended with “final protective fire” from the sixteen guns on the firing line, in total darkness. On signal, preset azimuth and range were set to produce a wall of interlocking, grazing fire by each gunner holding the trigger down until the ammunition belts ran out, or the barrels glowed red from the heat. Brass shell casings and steel links piled up in mounds on the red Georgia clay. The sight of thousands of rounds with orange tracers arcing and ricocheting through the noctilucent clouds of smoke on the firing line was strangely beautiful. For days after each class, the scent of black powder and cordite would stick in my nostrils. My hearing was seriously compromised, but the details of those firings would remain with me and eventually work their way into my art.

The recruits rolled endlessly through the pipeline. All those fresh faces, mostly caught up in the draft, watched intently from the bleachers; they knew that I and the other instructors had seen the elephant. We were credible and they were within months of shipping out to Vietnam. They would use what we taught them, but no training could prepare them for, or protect them from the traumatic stress of combat, and they would be imprinted with experiences that would change them all forever.

During my last military assignment at NATO headquarters in Belgium, I began to explore options for the next phase of my life. In the Army I had put aside all creative impulses that did not apply to my job, but now, as I thought about the future, they returned, in need of a new outlet. While my friends were becoming consultants to Honeywell and IBM, I longed to be more creative. I decided to enroll in The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; not a fiscally sound decision, but I was “yearning to breathe free” of corporate hierarchies in the second half of my life. The visual art language that I was learning was not really new, but familiar words took on new meanings and relevance. I was drawn to the physical aspects of sculpture because I wanted to deal with reality and not illusion. Balance, rhythm, symmetry, asymmetry, repetition, composition, line, surprise, along with scale, surface, reference, and form kept me in a constant state of experimentation and exploration. At first my focus was on welded steel sculpture. Very formal, very abstract, with no referential subtext. And my process was totally intuitive: to draw the viewer around the work, to offer visual surprises, to vary the surface texture, to extend to viewers an opportunity to read into the work whatever they saw. The intent was not to editorialize but to create visual poetry so that the viewer could become an active participant in the discovery of the piece; a goal that kept me totally immersed in the creative process for a number of years. It was a safe place for a combat veteran. There was nothing in the work to shake loose the flakes of all those memories imprinted in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

This intuitive process was and remains a mystery to me. Nearly all of the experimentation and innovation came while I was in the studio, while I had my hands on the welding torch, the angle grinder or the forging hammer. When I was in the zone and generating steel sculpture at a prolific rate I felt oblivious to my thirst, my bladder, my fatigue. It was a transcendence difficult to describe to non-artists, a state of being that I slipped in and out of while working in the studio, as if the muses were tossing out scraps of inspiration now and again, and then retreating to wherever muses go on their coffee breaks. Aesthetic challenges popped into my head in the form of questions: what would this piece of steel look like with a bevel cut? Can I find something to echo that texture, arc, line? Can the center of gravity be elevated without making the piece unstable? Critical to my modest success at this point was the ability to be open to the process and skilled in the techniques required to resolve each piece.

My military past entered my art when I saw Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon. It resonated more closely with my experiences in Vietnam than any of the previous flicks I’d seen. It struck a chord. I began to deal with my war experiences through my art. Vietnam had more ambiguity for me than for Stone; more shades of gray in the moral issues that he painted very white and very black. My response to Stone’s film served as a point of departure for my work. Narrative entered the work with an autobiographical back-story that added layers to each piece.

To paraphrase Paul Fussell in his book, Wartime, the difference between a combat journal entry and a memoir is the same difference between looking at the sun at high noon and seeing it at sunset; the former, stark and unembellished, the latter, softer and filtered through the passage of time and hindsight. I was beginning this artistic exploration more than twenty years after the fact. Over the years I had erected a lot of filters.

Important questions arose. How to explore, in three dimensions, the ironies, contradictions, and tensions in the relationship between those who serve at great personal risk and those who benefit from their sacrifice at little or no personal cost? How to keep the viewer engaged in a discovery process with military icons and imagery? And what, exactly, was I trying to communicate to the viewer? How to avoid cliché, being heavy-handed, moralistic, self-righteous, sentimental or angry? Resolving these issues would be like walking a slack rope. At all costs, I wanted to avoid the appearance of being just another pissed-off Vietnam veteran. A lot of angry art had been done by veterans, and by civilians who knew the war only vicariously; while it was surely cathartic, much of it lacked ambiguity, subtlety, and grace.

I had been dealing with the icons of military service: dog tags, combat boots, helmets, and weapons transformed in a variety of ways as metaphors and surrogates. The move from object making to kinetics came into my work by accident. On returning from Vietnam I had observed a general reluctance on the part of veterans to discuss the war, even with their wives and families. It was nearly impossible to share the experience of combat with them. To address this issue I fabricated a score of “crutches” painted with real and surreal camouflage patterns, broken, missing parts, patched or bandaged and suspended from marionette crosses. There they hung, ready to be manipulated by some unseen hand. The title for the piece seemed clear to me: “Welcome Home, Let’s Dance.” It said “You went off to war. I’m glad you’re back; now let’s get on with our lives.”

The ventilation system in the gallery in which it had been installed caused the suspended crutch forms to sway slightly. The motion was hypnotic and added another dimension to the piece that I had not intended, but which seemed to complete the statement I was after. Minefields became a metaphor for memories that erupted into my consciousness. As a lieutenant in Korea, I had led a mission to lay a minefield just south of the DMZ. Ironically, eight years later, as a major, my job was clearing minefields between the DMZ and the Imjin River. The first minefield was one I had carefully laid years before. All attempts to locate the first pod failed. Gravity and the combination of eight harsh winters and eight steamy summers had caused the mines to shift and drift in the soil, impossible to locate, even with a detailed plot. Recalling this led to an entirely different installation, “Minefields of Memory,” which involved kinetics from the beginning. Nearly forty “crutches” periodically danced and clattered above three elevated beds of roiling white rice, black abrasive and grey steel filings.

Three years on jump status at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina inspired another kinetic sculpture. During the war televised broadcasts of airborne operations, parachuting and free falls came to represent the war in South East Asia. These images became an installation alive with white and orange parachutes with TVs harnessed in, hoisted and then released from the ridge of the former church that housed our co-op gallery.

Memory of the firing ranges at Ft. Benning, Georgia suggested the idea of art gallery as “shooting gallery,” a metaphor for the draft, combat, and its aftermath. Silhouette targets were posted for duty in the gallery to get hit with whatever random markings were made by the “guns.” Then the veteran targets were dismounted and suspended in a separate part of the gallery that became a paper VFW post. The underlying simplicity took on more substantive issues. I engineered technical solutions for the artistic demands. The challenge was to design and fabricate a “squirt gun” capable of changing direction and range that could shoot a predetermined sequence of shots of liquid, twenty or thirty feet across a gallery. I’d need a target array capable of changing its attitude toward the guns so a variety of spatter patterns could be generated. The “gun” mechanism was next. With two small, reversible motors, switches, some sprockets and drive chains, and lots more tinkering, I had a working squirt gun, a.k.a. M60 machine gun. Each of the guns needed to fire in a specific sequence that collectively represented the fire fights I’d experienced in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

After the prototypes were tested, and the fabrication was completed, installation in the gallery followed, and with a lot of help from my friends, the show opened on schedule with all five guns and five targets, electronics, mechanics and hydraulics behaving as designed. It was short lived. The next five weeks were spent on call with tool kit and replacement parts at the ready. As one unit broke I would repair or replace it just in time to have an adjacent one fail. It was like having a basket full of puppies. I did manage to get video footage for a documentary, so the show lives on; but I confirmed yet again the axiom about kinetic sculpture, if it moves, it breaks.

Reflections on the “Fire Fight” came long after I had struck the show and stowed it in storage. The drop cloth, a twelve by twenty foot paper I had placed over a plastic membrane to protect the gallery floor, stayed rolled up in a loft for a couple of years before I hauled it down and looked at it with new eyes. During the show’s tenure, I was content to let the layers of color build up, under, and around the guns and targets. Like the water colors that they essentially were, they spread, merged, overlayed, broke into component colors, dried, and repeated the process five days each week for five weeks. (the drop cloth was a visual record or reflection of what had occurred in the area of operations).

The result was a very large ground of unusual and random patterns and marks, that, in their ambiguity, could have suggested satellite images of earth, Chinese landscapes, or topographic compilations in varying intensities of emerald, umber, black, blue, and purple. This, as a whole and in selected parts, I dubbed “collateral damage” since it represented the “damage” done not to the intended targets, but to the surrounding “terrain”. While I cannot claim to have painted them, they were generated by the mechanisms that I designed, so I can claim authorship, albeit remotely.

The decision making process, left/right brained, in retrospect, was not as clearly defined as I initially suspected. What I had thought were distinct functions in both hemispheres were and remain really quite thoroughly integrated. The left side is dominant, however. I have to regularly smack it down so that there can be more spontaneity in my work. The left has an inherent need, indeed, a compulsion for order and neatness that disdains asymmetry and all those marks outside the box; it relishes pattern recognition; it eschews randomness. The right lobe seemed to consider the skills afforded by the left brain as part of its palette and draws on it for support at will. The obverse does not appear to be true. The right brain likes to run in the rain, splash in the puddles and play in the mud. It is what you would expect from an infantryman.

CNN continues to broadcast footage from combat zones. The terrain has changed, as have the uniforms and the weapons, and, of course, the “enemy”; but the tracers still arc in grimly graceful curves toward their targets just as they did in the last war, and the one before that, and the one before that. The traumatic experiences on both ends of the barrel are deeply imprinted on the psyches of combatants and non-combatants alike, memories that last a lifetime. There is no recipe for converting those experiences into a meaningful art. Over two and a half million of us served in Vietnam, and there were over two and a half million different experiences. Mine found an outlet through sculpture; perhaps it speaks also for many who remain silent.

“It ain’t braggin,’ if you really done it.”

– Dizzy Dean