War Comes Home

"War Comes Home"    watercolor by Jan Barry

Some memory or anniversary or image triggered a nightmare awhile ago in which I was a Vietnam vet suddenly amid a swirling crowd of students at Kent State when a Ohio National Guard unit fired rifles to break up an antiwar demonstration on campus, killing four students, wounding and scarring many others.

I felt tore apart, physically and emotionally, in this nightmare—I was being shot at by soldiers wearing the same uniform I wore in Vietnam! Struggling out of bed, I felt embedded in May 1970. Back then, as news of the Kent State shootings spread while I was visiting with stunned and outraged vets at a campus demonstration that closed down classes at Syracuse University, I had a panic attack: my government was out to kill me for protesting the war I served in.

It took weeks this summer to work out the details of that nightmare in a watercolor. The veteran in the painting is based on Vietnam vets I met or read about who were students at Kent State at the time of the shooting. The other images are based on photos that appeared in news publications and now on Google.

While I was working on this artwork, a nightmarish military apparition was set upon civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri: tank-like vehicles back from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, police units in military combat gear aiming rifles at outraged citizens, tear gas and stun grenades fired down an American city’s main street and into residential neighborhoods.

This is another of the horrendous consequences of  Uncle Sam’s virtually endless warmaking—Americans turning on each other, shredding the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution in a blaze of official self-righteousness.