AUTHOR'S MESSAGE.

............"art is communication, if the viewer sees what I see, feels what I feel, and is touched as I am touched, we have communicated and thus we have art"..............
                                                                                                          Frank Romeo
                                                                                                          National Veterans
                                                                                                          Art Museum



My life's work is just that, a lifelong struggle of working to understand my life as a work in progress. My attitude and manner of communicating may at times seem brash and cutting with a touch of anger and a hint of loathing but I assure you this is not the case. My sarcastic facetious tone is my way of sending home a point and above all else my humor drives my vision. If we can't laugh at ourselves then we have no right to laugh at others sharing an understanding that transcends the veneer we put forth.

I forgive all that have hurt me in some way even if its all in my own mind. I hold no grudges against any individuals or humanity as a whole in which life's journey has crossed paths with mine in a conflict of some sort.  My work is carried out in a spirit of truth, healing, and understanding of ourselves and our world and its relationship to us as individuals. It is with this mindset I reach out to others with my art, lecturing, and writing as a vehicle of communication. A dialogue in any form that perhaps reaches one individual may make a difference. That difference is as much for me as it is for them for I need communication more than most. My work is as much about my survival as it is about others.

My work is not pro or anti war, it is however about the reality of war and what it does to us as individuals. As a society we continue to take our children off ball fields and out of classrooms and teach them to kill. Our children learn to paint their faces black and sneak around in the dark undetected and blow things up while slicing throats in silence. Yet when something goes wrong i.e.; May Lai Massacre, urinating on dead Talaban, or Abu Gre we scratch our heads and wonder what went wrong. How could this have happened we ask? I'm personally surprised it hasn't happened more and so is any other veteran struggling with these same issues. It is these issues that afflict our society wasting our talented youth and driving them underground as my generation did to me. We compound the problem exponentially by jumping from one war to another before the dust has settled. In past generations there was twenty years between wars and now its every other year. Our veterans, not having time to live a full life, are piling up stressing our society to its limits.


Vietnam Veterans held the suicide record for decades until now. Todays veterans are committing suicide at an average rate of fourteen a month and one in four homeless is a veteran. This is unacceptable. We haven't solved the problems of yesterdays veterans and now we have a host of all new veterans with new problems. Yet we continue on the same path increasing these statistics without answers. Todays generation, like the Baby Boomers, will pay for Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of their lives. We still pay for Vietnam Veterans through social programs and medical assistance, not to mention the psychological damage inflicted on what was once our children.

Looking back on the 199th and the job we did and the people we lost troubles me greatly. I struggle to understand what it was all about and why we did some of the things we did. I especially spend a lot of time thinking about the losses on both sides and the civilians caught in harms way. The children especially haunt me nightly as I wrestle with their fate. I take responsibility for their deaths as a member of the human race. My part was hands on and so I feel more responsible than most yet we as a race are all responsible for the care and treatment of others. I've come to terms with my involvement for better or for worse and live my life accordingly. I do not force responsibility on anyone but instead I lay the issues out before us all. I don't judge, I encourage. I encourage truth, understanding and hope.

Today a lot of veterans and their families struggle with these 

very issues and after 50 years grieve over the loss of loved ones
and yet the beat goes on. We find ourselves in the same
quagmire, looking for answers. Newsday calls the
Vietnam War, "The War That Never Ends". 

Daily news articles appear with stories of PTSD.


The life expectancy of Vietnam Veterans is shorted by a host
of illness's. A pack of cigarettes in every meal helped the

soldier on the road to lung disease.  Almost 75%
of Vietnam Veterans have Hepatitis-C from either transfusions
or inoculation guns. Agent Orange, psychological problems,
substance abuse just to name a few have helped

the veteran ease into nonexistence.




It's Deja vu all over again!

One of our bravest being hugged by Obama. She'll need more
than a hug and somebody will have to pay. 

That's only one story, there are many more.

For those that didn't get the help they needed in time.

Two of my children were born hearing impaired linked to auditory processing disorders. It is virtually impossible to make a case connecting it to Agent Orange. In the past the waiting time alone for a hearing decision has been as long as three years. Many disgusted veterans simply give up.

Interesting, Kennedy on the left with his advisors in

the Oval Office trying to figure out what to do about Vietnam.

Obama on the right in the same Oval Office with his

advisors trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan.

In the late sixties Vietnam Veterans went to the Veterans Administration for help. Stories like mine were the prevalent saga being told with variations. Nightmares, sleepless nights, flashbacks, paranoia, and a host of other issues to numerous to mention became known as "Vietnam War Syndrome". This rhetoric repeated itself for over a decade until the early 80's when the red flag had gone up so many times something needed to be done. Congress, then in the mid 80's, commissioned a study on "Vietnam War Syndrome" and the study lasted another 10 years. Finally in the early 90's the American Psychiatric Association published it's findings. The organization set up rules and diagnosis for "Vietnam War Syndrome" and renamed it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Almost 30 years after the first reported cases the world took notice.

Because of the quiet suffering of Vietnam Veterans people today are offered treatment for "Vietnam War Syndrome" or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Victims of violent crimes, 911, hurricanes, tsunami, and of course the returnees of Iraq and Afghanistan are all treated for PTSD. The Vietnam Veteran, in his quiet unassuming underground nature, went from being spit on to a National Treasure in one short turbulent lifetime.

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