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Four years ago, I set out on a journey. Haunted by word that my little brother was soon to ship out to Iraq, and troubled by personal misgivings regarding the war, I began to obsessively watch for reports of Americans killed in action. At that point in the war, the evening news featured frequent KIA reports, showing portraits and photographs of the soldiers most recently lost. As they faded from picture to picture, I searched the faces, looking (I thought) for old ROTC friends and acquaintances. In reality, I was seeking something else. Slowly, I came to the horrifying realization that I was looking for some sign of my brother in the faces of the dead.
What I found, instead, was an intangible thread, a commonality that I could not quantify. Was is the set of their jaws, or perhaps the grim determination in each gaze? There was something terrifyingly familiar, yet out of intellectual reach. My father joined the Marine Corps when I was a child, thus I spent a good deal of time living on military installations. I wondered if that time, spent among soldiers and their families, had colored my perception of these faces.
I knew that, in order to settle my mind, I would have to find a way to quantify (or at least identify) the thing I was seeing/sensing. So I looked up the names of all of the American soldiers killed in Iraq at that point. The next month was spent researching that list, scouring the internet to find as many photographs as possible (this was an incredibly intense and painful experience). Next, I wrote custom software that would allow me to composite and find the average from hundreds or thousands of images. The initial outcome was compelling, but unsatisfactory.
I waited a few weeks, but found that my mind was still overwhelmed by the vague connection I was seeing between the individual faces. So I revised my process, went back through the photos and aligned the eyes and mouth of each soldier's face, individually, and re-composited them.
The result left me, quite literally, in tears. I was confronted by a face, unknown to me yet achingly familiar. It was a perfect, visual representation of that commonality that had seemed so intangible to me. This is the image you see at the top of this post, The Known Soldier: the face of our ongoing sacrifice, the price of our nation's hubris.
At the time, I intended to go back and update the image with the fallen soldiers from each year that the war continued. With great shame I admit that I have failed, the burden is just too painful.
I figured Memorial Day was a good time to finally put that all in writing.
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| - Lars |
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