Single channel video installation, projection on news paper made sulpture. Loop. 

 

The sound track is an audio recording from the interncommunication system for American troops in Vietnam War along with a computer generated voice reading news report on soldiers who came back from war from New York Times. 

 

Some excerpt from the text:

 

For Soldier Disfigured in War, a Way to Return to the World

By JAMES DAO

 

Published: January 30, 2012

--Wrapped in bandages from head almost to toe, he immediately saw his girlfriend and mother, and felt comforted. Then he glanced at his hands, two balls of white gauze, and realized that he had no fingers.

--His swollen lower lip hung below his gums. His left lower eyelid drooped hound dog-like, revealing a scarlet crescent of raw tissue. His nostrils were squeezed shut, his chin had virtually disappeared and the top half of one ear was gone. Skin grafts crisscrossed his face like lines on a map, and silver medicine coated his scars, making him look like something out of a Terminator film.

“This is who I am now,” he told himself.

--“The burns on a soldier’s face are huge: It’s your military uniform and you can’t take it off,” he said.

 

Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds

By DENISE GRADY

Published: January 22, 2006

-- Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates.

-- Shrapnel tore into the left side of his face and flew out from under his right eye. Metal fragments and the force of the blast fractured his skull in multiple places and injured his brain, one of its major arteries, and his left eye and ear. Every bone in his face was broken. Some, including his nose and portions of his eye sockets, were shattered. Part of his jawbone was pulverized.

-- Bleeding, infection, swelling of the brain - any or all could have killed someone with such a severe head injury, the doctor said.

-- "We talked about the possibility of war, but none of us thought it was really going to happen," said his father, who had to sign the enlistment papers because his son was only 17.

-- In his first weeks, he hid behind sunglasses and, even though the weather was hot, ski caps and high turtlenecks.

-- "He was an incredibly handsome guy," she said. "His twin sister is a beautiful woman. He was the life of the party. He was funny. He could have had any woman, and he comes back and feels like now he's a monster."