FORSAKEN FACES

MATERIUM Empyrean SOULS

artist statement

I was a ten year-old boy In the summer of 1965 when my father received orders to serve in the Vietnam War with the Seventh Fleet in Japan. While the US Navy shipped our household belongings to the Far East, we boarded the USS General JC Breckinridge, a World War II-era transport ship, for a month-long journey across the Pacific Ocean with 4,000 troops destined to Vietnam. Among them was Staff Sergeant Jimmy Stewart, attached to U.S. Army, Company B, 2d Battalion, 12th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division.

Every day, I watched those men beyond the eight-foot chain-link fence separating us as they smoked on deck, playing cards, watching me watching them. I have never forgotten their faces. Their stone cold glare toward the horizon, their blank expressions of boredom, or the MP’s guards Salute as my Father and I went ship aft to feed our shepard Misty.

Jimmy Stewart was Killed In Action on May 18, 1966.

He was Posthumously Cited the Medal Of Honor on August 24, 1967

I’M SO LONESOME I COULD DIE

“Hear that lonesome whippoorwill?
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low:
I’m so lonesome I could cry.

I’ve never seen a night so long,
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind a cloud,
To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a Robin weep,
When leaves begin to die?
That means he’s lost his will to live.
I’m so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star,
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are,
I’m so lonesome I could cry.
I’m so lonesome I could cry.”