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Meredith Jack
Born Kansas City, Kansas, 1943
Served in Vietnam, Army,
369th Signal Battalion, Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon,
fixed-station facilities controller,
high-grade communications, 1969-70
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I regarded the whole Vietnam situation as a geopolitical mistake and I question my own participation in it. I don't have any horror stories or humorous anecdotes of the war: I was one of the seven people who supported every fighting man in the field and my memories are of dullness and lethargy, doing a job that would probably have been quite interesting in better circumstances. I worked in high-grade communications, the military equivalent to AT&T.
During 1969 and 1970 I was not an artist, though I had been one before and would be one again. I was a 32D20 assigned to the TSN detachment of Company A, 369th Signal Battalion, RVN. It was good duty and drew good pay; it kept me safe and busy. I had some access to art supplies from Saigon bookstores and could draw. I had allowed myself to be drafted, trained, and assigned without much active intent; I had felt dimly that I would be missing something if I didn't go and when I got my draft notice in my last semester of graduate school, though I was closer to Canada than Kansas, I packed up, went home, and accepted what seemed inevitable. I still wonder if I made the correct turn when I got on the highway and to this day my feeling is one of sadness; I grieve for those who died, or worse. I question the sanity and integrity of those who sent us there.
I had known before I was drafted that I wanted to make art; others found their way into art after Vietnam. For a Foreign Prairie is about the quiet after. In format and proportion it refers to the similarity between the prairies of the Midwest and the rice-producing area of Vietnam where I was stationed. The forged spikes are similar to missiles, bombs, bullets, pungee sticks, and other implements of destruction. They surround and hopefully protect the rows of grave mounds—I'm not sure whose. War and art share some attributes. Some vets have never really returned from Vietnam; some are still traumatized by the horrors they witnessed or the wounds they received; some miss the exhilaration of living on the edge. If artists are truly doing their job they take some similar risks, exposing to public view their innermost concerns and feelings. They too must put themselves in harm's way and live on the edge. |
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