Many in the military fear that “putting their skin in the game” will be forgotten, and some have taken steps to keep memories of their fallen comrades alive. These may be found in an old form of art, the tattoo, specifically the memorial tattoo.

Mary Beth Heffernan, a photographer and associate professor of sculpture and photography at Occidental College, documented U. S. Marine memorial tattoos on film and incorporated them into a gallery exhibit, “The Soldier’s Skin: An Endless Edition.” The exhibit was shown at the Pasadena City College Art Gallery between October 10 and November 17, 2007, which was organized in conjunction with the citywide Pasadena Festival of Art and Ideas. Marines may be a specialized form of soldier, but most Marines prefer to be thought of as Marines rather than soldiers, as referenced in the exhibit’s title. The endless edition refers to Heffernan displaying her photolithographs arranged in stacks on a floor. To me, it brings tombstones to mind. Heffernan encourages viewers to take home copies from the stack, free of charge and reflect on them.

This image of a tattoo on the back of U. S. Marine, Joshua Hall. was photographed by Heffernan on February 3, 2006. It was reproduced as a 24” x 27” poster in unlimited quantity for the show in 2007. Memorialized on dog tags, along with his grandfather and uncle who died in war, are other fallen Marine brothers in arms.

Other Heffernan images may be found on the following links:  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-1027-heffernan-pg,0,5619148.photogallery?coll=la-tot-entertainment; and http://www.artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles2007/Articles1007/MBHeffernanA.html.

The cover of Heffernan’s exhibit catalog features a young girl holding a 19” x 27” poster showing the tattoo on the front of Owen McNamara’s body, taken on February 6, 2006. During his second tour in Iraq, McNamara was twenty years old. While attending a promotion ceremony, ten of his fellow Marines were killed at a booby-trapped patrol base. The tattoo which covers most of his upper torso has inscribed, “In Memory of Our Fallen Brothers,” positioned above a helmet carrying his unit’s identification, sitting on top of a rifle with its bayonet stuck into the ground dated, “Dec. 1, 2005,” flanked by two dog tags bearing “Never” “Forget.” Empty boots are arranged at the base with five shell casings on either side with the last names of his fallen brothers floating above each of the casings. McNamara was wounded on his first tour in Iraq, and he has a tattoo on his arm to capture this memory.

Even though Heffernan focused on the particular, the images tell us much more about war and the current need of Marines to honor the fallen and preserve their memories in a society that prefers to ignore their sacrifices. For some Marines, Heffernan notes, tattoos are rites of passage and much more. Marines are aware of their mortality and some design tattoos in advance that their friends will have inscribed if they are killed.

Heffernan offers some other thoughts on the Marine memorial tattoos. She sees them as a type of ritual wounding. Pain, healing, and inscription are seen as part of the memorial. It allows for a type of communion with fallen brothers through their own suffering, during the creation of the tattoo. Sometimes the pain goes on for hours. As the body heals and the expression is made, Heffernan notes, the trauma associated with them hardens and closes. Summing up, Heffernan states,

Most of all, the memorial is an attempt to assign stable meaning to an event that is beyond representation: death that is random, violent, disorienting, unfathomably gruesome. The active duty marine who memorializes his brother’s death shimmers in an uneasy present between the threat of his own death and his buddy’s past life. By scripting his mourning onto the surface of his body, the marine permanently flags his own trauma and loss; the soldier’s skin becomes a site of mourning the past and warning the future.

Heffernan has been interested in skin as the site that separates the self from the other, and nature from culture. She spent three months in 2006 researching the project in tattoo parlors located in Twentynine Palms, a small town in southeastern California, near a Marine base. Some of the Marines she witnessed have served multiple tours in combat.

Why do many Marines feel the need to memorialize their fallen comrades on their skin? The answer to this question may be found in the essence of the phrase, “skin in the game,” and in a desire to not have these “skins” forgotten. In a sense, the skin of these Marines allows for the preservation of personal, interpersonal and collective memories. The skins capture life and death, the memories of them, and they tell a political story for those who are inclined not to forget.

On May 6^th, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) announced the names of five American servicemen that were being inscribed on the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall), and will be read for the first time on this Memorial Day, at 1 p.m. In addition, the designations of eight names are being changed from missing in action, signified by a cross, to confirmed dead, symbolized by a diamond. The criteria and decisions for being included on The Wall are set by the Department of Defense. With the additions, the total number of names inscribed (killed or remaining missing in action) is 58,272.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was established in 1979 by a group of veterans led by Jan Scruggs, and, over the years, has been “dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D. C., promoting healing and educating about the impact of the Vietnam War.” In July 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized the Fund to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a site near the Lincoln Memorial in Constitution Gardens. The Fund explains that the resulting monument “was built to honor all who served with the U. S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. It has become known as an international symbol of healing and is the most-visited memorial on the National Mall.”

The Memorial consists of more than the well known Wall that was designed by Maya Ying Lin. The other sites for remembrance are the Flagpole that was installed in 1983 around which the emblems of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard are displayed; the Three Servicemen Statue, designed by Frederick Hart and dedicated in 1984; the Vietnam Women’s Memorial designed by Glenna Goodacre and dedicated in 1993; and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commemorative Plaque, also called the “In Memory Plaque, ” dedicated in 2004 to honor veterans who died after the war as a direct result of injuries which were incurred in Vietnam, but do not qualify for inclusion on The Wall. An education center is being planned.

The names of American military casualties of the Vietnam War are the core element of the Memorial. The initiators wanted to insure that those who were sacrificed would not be forgotten. Inscribed in the black granite, the names are a powerful symbolic expression, which brings many visitors to tears. Among the current 58,272 engraved names are the ones of those designated as missing. Not included are veterans who were casualties of Agent Orange, an herbicide considered carcinogenic by many, the victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder related suicides and the fatalities among non U. S. military personnel. The memorial also leaves unnamed millions of Vietnamese military and civilian casualties inflicted by all sides during the war. Statistics on Vietnamese casualties are spotty at best, in part because North Vietnam wanted to conceal the hardships it was enduring, and in part because the narratives that have been told in the United States have been focused on Americans, not the Vietnamese.

© 2003 Seth Rossman | Wikimedia Commons

Notwithstanding this lack of inclusiveness, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial may be considered a gateway and turning point in Vietnam War meaning and memory making. With the creation of the Memorial, a memory block was eliminated, and an outpouring of remembrances and representations ensued.  The discussions that led up to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the approval process, the building of the memorial, and the visitations to the memorial helped legitimize more open public discussions about and representations of the war, providing a stimulus for personal, interpersonal, collected and collective memories about the Vietnam War. A proliferation of Vietnam War contributions appeared in the media, popular culture, art and academic works.

The project to build a memorial came to fruition through a bottom up approach to civic action. It emerged from kitchen table politics, an example of the “politics of small things” as Goldfarb puts it. While the design elements of the Memorial have been controversial over the years, they have been implemented to accommodate competing memories associated with the Vietnam War and the need to heal relative to continuing divisions. Associational activities inspired by individual contributors with a vision yielded the creation of the memorial, revealing many competing memories associated with it. Approving, funding, creating, building, opening, maintaining, commemorating, and facilitating visiting and accessing the Memorial helped open the creative flows of Vietnam War representations that followed, and influenced the reception of them.

Small things matter relative to the establishment of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial including: the personal initiatives of Jan C. Scruggs, president and founder of the VVMF, to establish the Memorial; the leadership of Diane Carlson Evans to create the Vietnam Women’s Memorial; and the thousands upon thousands of personal actions of individuals who have left behind objects at The Wall which have been preserved by the National Parks Service.

“When people freely meet and talk to each other as equals, reveal their differences, display their distinctions, and develop a capacity to act together, they create power,” Goldfarb maintains about the politics of small things. In this instance, the power developed into associational efforts to help shape memories of the Vietnam War and heal a nation.

In these past few days, I have read and heard many responses to President Obama’s speech at the memorial service at the University of Arizona, including that of Jeff Goldfarb here at Deliberately Considered. While I agree with many of the encomiums to that speech – praise for its sincerity, civility, appeal to democracy, appreciation for individual lives – I am in a distinct minority in feeling that it was not altogether successful as a moment of high and consequential political rhetoric.

It was not the Gettysburg Address. Of course, it may seem unkind to compare Obama’s speech to that one of the ages by Lincoln, but I believe the tasks of that speech were similar to those of Lincoln and that it fell short of the mark. Public ceremonies of this type have unique challenges – memorialize the victims of violence, appeal to the better angels of the nation, re-establish the authority of the state, indicate a way forward.

The main issues involve choices of genre and structure. For me, Obama’s speech oscillated without adequate accounting or warning between the genres of private lamentation, religious homily, and political oration. Without an overarching structure that linked these genres together, their coming and going unsettled me as a listener. Was so much reference to scripture appropriate in a civil ceremony? Was so much detail about individual personalities befitting a national oration by a head of state?

The speech caused me to reflect on prior moments of national traumas that challenged leaders to make sense through collective reckoning. Traumas like wars and assassinations that resonate upwards, from individuals through families and communities, to the larger social and political collectivity call forth formal responses by heads of state. And these responses transform the traumas into history. Hegel linked history itself to the state: “It is the State [he wrote] which first presents a subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.”   The state thus views itself as the central character of history, with an agency and a political body of its own, capable of being wounded.  The lives of individuals, whether caught up as soldiers in war, or as workers in a ruptured economy, or as victims of terrorist attacks, find themselves and their individual points of view eclipsed by that of the state itself. And this is true regardless of how central to the state’s very progress these individuals are.

The speech by President Obama last Wednesday night made me reflect specifically on Lincoln’s magnificent “Remarks” at the ceremonies dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  In his brilliant analysis of The Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills writes of Abraham Lincoln’s adaptation of the Greek Epitaphios or Funeral Oration to the task of dedicating a military cemetery on the site of the former American Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.  Of this classical template, Wills writes that it provided a “prose form of the Greek orations that was meant to be bracing after the sung lament (threnos) of the burial rite…The prose form is itself a return to political life, a transition from family mourning to the larger community’s sense of purpose.”  Lincoln built his speech up from a series of oppositions – life and death, word and deed, nature and society – and managed to extol the individual soldiers and their deeds without naming or describing them. And he ends with the transcendent frame of “the government of the people shall not perish from the earth.”

From sung lamentation to prosodic oratory, the State claims its transcendent purview. The State thus has its genres and can, at moments like that at Gettysburg, deploy them effectively. But we need to assess other historical moments of crisis, like that of the last weeks after the shootings in Tucson, in which the line between the purview and prerogatives of the state and those of individuals and families is not so clear cut, when the “right” genre for representing historical events does not so easily present itself, and when the confusion is largely a function of discord over the meaning of an event in real time.

The task then becomes doubly difficult – to fashion a language of interpretation that moves to that collective level of history but that also takes seriously the work of threnos (lamentation).  Greek tragedy, another genre, found that middle way, largely because the families whose actions were performed were literally the families heading the state. And tragedies like Antigone were especially tuned to this combining, focusing on the conflicting demands of family and state. But the language of “family” can be expansive or restrictive as given society chooses to interpret it.  Bifurcating the prerogatives of the private sphere and those of the public sphere can ultimately entail a loss of sympathy and collegiality in the most expansive meaning of the terms, that is in terms Hannah Arendt would put forward. Rather, it is possible to highlight the trajectory from threnos (lamentations of the family) to epitaphios (funerary oration) that carries forward the apprehension of the singularity of the one who is missing or mourned even in a genre that expresses the needs of the collectivity. I believe that this was Obama’s aim, and why he spent considerable time reflecting on the details of the lives of the individuals killed in Tucson. For many listeners, Obama’s speech hit the mark, moving them emotionally and drawing them together collectively. With the Gettysburg Address in the back of my mind, I found myself wanting more.

Barack Obama is the foremost orator in my life time. During the Presidential campaign, I thought that this may be the case. The first two years of his Presidency raised some doubts. I knew the talent was there, but would the talent be used effectively to enable him to be the great President that I thought he could and hoped he would be? But after his speech at the Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona, I have no doubt. No other public figure could have accomplished what I think President Obama accomplished last night.

He spoke as the head of state, not as a partisan candidate or leader, and a deeply divided country became, at least momentarily, united in response to his beautifully crafted and delivered address. He enabled us to grieve together, helped us try to make sense together, and challenged us to respectfully act together, despite our differences.

The power of the speech was revealed by the reaction to it. Even Glenn Beck recognized Obama’s accomplishment, and publicly thanked the President for giving the best speech of his career.   And the instant analysis of the panel at Fox News praised the excellence and effectiveness of the President’s inspirational address.   Charles Krauthammer concluded the discussion, recognizing that the President appeared and spoke as the head of state, not as an ideological politician, and maintained that it may have a significant effect on Obama’s fortunes. “I am not sure it’s going to have a trivial effect on the way he is perceived.” This from one of Obama’s major critics.

Of course Obama’s supporters, including most of the people attending the service in Tucson at the vast McKale Memorial Center at the University of Arizona, were deeply moved. My friends and I at the Theodore Young Community Center were especially pleased that our guy did so well.

And the commentators of the major newspapers and blogs were almost universally in agreement of the speeches inventiveness and excellence. Dionne, Robinson, Thiessen , Gerson at the Washington Post , Collins and the Times editorial voice at The New York Times , John Dickerson at Slate , John Guardiano at FrumForum, and, in a most interesting acknowledgement of the rarity of Obama’s achievement, Rick Brookhiser at the National Review.

Obama is probably the only major politician who became a national figure because of one speech, his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.

When his campaign for the Presidency was most severely challenged by the politics of race surrounding his relationship with his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., he gave the most important speech on the problem of race given by a candidate for the Presidency, as I analyzed in a previous post.

Now he has given a remarkable speech that marked a solemn occasion, by remembering with specificity those who died, those who survived and those who acted heroically. And then he addressed the political divisions in the country, most recently concerning whether the heated hateful rhetoric (much of it directed at the policies and person of Obama) has contributed to the tragedy . He did this in a way that made his most principled point for civility, uniting his divided audience:

“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. (Applause.)…

For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. (Applause.) But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. (Applause.) That we cannot do. (Applause.) That we cannot do.”(link)

In the days immediately following the Tucson Massacre, the divide was between those who argued that the violence of political rhetoric, specifically of the right, was somehow related to the Tucson massacre, and those who argued that this was unfounded and divisive at best, a blood libel, as Sarah Palin unfortunately put it.  The response to a national tragedy was an even more divided nation. Obama turned the table.

He agreed with Palin, et.al., that we will likely never know what motivated Jared Lee Loughner and that the nature of our political discourse was not likely an immediate cause, but he disagreed with the Palin (who repeatedly reminded her audience during the Presidential campaign that Barack Hussein Obama palled around with terrorists) about what the proper nature of political discourse should be. He struck a blow in favor of civility.  His speech  makes incivility more than unpleasant.  It is less likely now to yield practical results. He marked a standard for future action that all Americans applauded, and this will have consequences. I agree with Charles Krauthammer: it’s not going to have a trivial effect.

Now it will be interesting to see how the Republicans advance the ‘‘Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.’’ Perhaps they will have the decency to at least change the name of this meaningless gesture.