David Smith Born Portland, Oregon, 1950 Served in Vietnam, Marine Corps, 2d Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 3d Marine Division, I Corps, A Shau Valley to Khe Sanh, rifleman, 1969
				Untitled, 1986, egg tempera, encaustic, bole, and gold, aluminum, and pigmented leaf on gessoed wood, 39 x 51 in.
		Writing means thinking and I just can't think for long about the war. It brings up such conflicts. It's all right and it's all wrong. On the one hand the war was despicable; on the other, being a young infantryman in Vietnam was probably one of the best jobs ever. It was certainly more interesting than anything I've done since. It's taken me a long time to combine war with art. What happened to me in Vietnam has become a set of stories in my mind. These stories have been developing over the years since I've been back from the war, and I don't know whether these stories, my memories of Vietnam, truly match what happened. Much of what happened in Vietnam hapened by chance. Why wasn't I killed? Since then, I've been studying the mathematics of chance and watching the patterns that occur in random processes to try to understand the events of which I was a part. The paintings are abstract fields of points—distribution patterns of points from statistics and probability theory—while the points themselves are recognizable images—helicopters, jet fighters, numbers, letters, words, the shapes of jungle camouflage, the essence of Vietnam. The paintings contain violence, but it is the violence of helplessness in the face of chance, and the viewer participates in that violence through the image of random events. The paintings are altarpieces and icons because altarpieces and icons can contain violence, the violence of crucifixion or of martyrdom, while still holding the mind and eye in contemplation. The technique of mathematical modeling, together with the images and symbols of the war, gives me a way, while painting, to watch again and again the events, people, and places of Vietnam. I can't paint what napalm or white phosphorus or claymore mines do, nor can I paint what a firefight is like. Any attempt to do so would end up like a poster for a bad horror movie, and would repel the act of memory. The paintings are memorials and making them is a ritual act that helps me to remember the war, and to give meaning to the fact that I am still alive. Recently, I made an entire roomful of sand paintings of military images and images from nature, titled Battle Maze. Hidden under the sand were hundreds of small explosive charges wired together and controlled by a random computer program. As people watched, bits of the paintings exploded. It was a beautiful place slowly destroyed by random violence. A real boy's show: you make something beautiful and then you blow it up. In another installation, 1 Out if 5, I covered an entire wall with computer-generated random sequences of two images—a burning helicopter and a camouflage pattern. As I pasted each image to the wall, new shapes and patterns emerged, taking on a syntax and meaning. But since the entire process was random, "it don't mean nothing," as we used to say in Vietnam.