Dr. Ahn's Flute
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| Ken Hruby, Vietnam, 1964 |
Dr. Ahn made a flute. He made it out of bamboo and he made it right there in the middle of the jungle. This was not an ordinary shepherd's pipe either; this one played the full chromatic scale with all the sharps and flats. And the scale was the first thing he played. Then an aire by Bach - "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", or "Aire on a G String". I do not recall which. But the notes were true and, God, how they soared. They rose above the drone of unseen bugs and birds and the muffled din of our Vietnamese rifle battalion breaking camp, oddly at ease with the place, but not the time.
During the first three weeks of the operation I observed his progress as he first picked the right piece of bamboo with just the right diameter and section length. With the field surgical kit, of all things, he then proceeded to drill, carve, whittle and scrape the bamboo until the flute took form. He actually had a formula written on a piece of scrap paper: frequencies corresponding to notes, corresponding to pipe diameter. He had calculated where the finger holes had to be, how large the aperture should be drilled and all the rest of it - right there in the middle of the Central Highland jungle.
It was an impressive undertaking, and, I'll confess, a bit humbling. Not only did Dr. Ahn know both Eastern and Western medical arts and sciences, but he also spoke at least four languages that I could distinguish AND could design, fabricate and play a flute. He also must have known from some private intelligence sources that it was OK to play it then and there.
I never told anyone about the Vietnamese regimental surgeon, the flute and J.S. Bach. It seemed too insignificant. There were some real war stories to tell, after all. As with too many experiences, the memory gets tucked away in some dark wrinkle of the hippocampus, where, unnourished by retelling, it either vanished into the ether or it is launched into our consciousness by some hair trigger. I cannot pin down the trigger. But somewhere between the NEA censorship debates and the run up to the Gulf War, as I drilled, whittled and scraped to prepare for my sculpture show, the memory of gentle Dr. Ahn and his flute unfolded before me.
* * *
CNN’s latest news feed from Afghanistan brings the war right into my living room in high definition, on wide screen, in living color. The images are fresh, recorded a few hours ago from an isolated outpost near the Pakistan boarder. It is quite late there; machine guns mounted on Humvees fire tracers into the dark desert night. The incandescent arcs are all too familiar. In an earlier life I had been the one with his finger on the trigger. The job is given now to younger backs and hands, not yet worn down or worn out. Vietnam is forty years behind me, but the sight of those burning rounds streaming through the blackness is seared into my memory. I look at the tracers now, not with a the eyes of an infantryman, but with the eyes of a sculptor, and the beauty of those ballistic trajectories haunts me. My inspiration comes from the Muses now and not from Mars.
The transformation I made from soldier to sculptor was not a radical metamorphosis. I was an iconoclast as a soldier, a graduate of the United States Military Academy working on the radical fringes of the conservative military culture. I advocated legalizing pot but restricting booze on post. I saw the damage that “happy hours,”“prop blasts,” and “twenty-five cent shot nights” inflicted on both units and individuals; some became violent or abusive, and some couldn’t perform their duties. My ideas were not well received by the airborne colonels and generals who had come up through the ranks in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Today I stand on the conservative edge of the contemporary art world, and all I did was take a few half-steps to the left.
Somehow I completed the four years of engineering studies at West Point: Mechanics of Solids, Thermodynamics, Military Topography and Graphics. Very analytical. Very precise. Along with five hundred and thirty-three classmates, I became a competent problem solver and mastered the skills needed to soldier well for over twenty years. Now I apply those skills to making art.
After graduation back-to-back tours in Korea and Vietnam pushed any thought of "self-actualization" off my priorities list. An old Army aphorism summed up the situation: "When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your mission is to drain the swamp."
Between my second and third "short" combat tours I was assigned to the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia as a machine gunnery instructor. The war in Vietnam was ramping up. From the Galloway ranges in the sandy pine forests east of the main post, our team ran two, sometimes three Infantry Training classes a week: scripted explanations of the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of the M-60 and 50 Caliber machine guns. We demonstrated firings from the bipod and tripod, range cards, care and cleaning, and both day and night firings. No Rambo shots from the hip. No cowboy stunts. The students were required to traverse and elevate the gun barrels in controlled bursts to engage multiple targets at various ranges and directions. Each class ended with "final protective fire" from the sixteen guns on the firing line, in total darkness. On signal, preset azimuth and range were set to produce a wall of interlocking, grazing fire by each gunner holding the trigger down until the ammunition belts ran out, or the barrels glowed red from the heat. Brass shell casings and steel links piled up in mounds on the red Georgia clay. The sight of thousands of rounds with orange tracers arcing and ricocheting through the noctilucent clouds of smoke on the firing line was strangely beautiful. For days after each class, the scent of black powder and cordite would stick in my nostrils. My hearing was seriously compromised, but the details of those firings would remain with me and eventually work their way into my art.
The recruits rolled endlessly through the pipeline. All those fresh faces, mostly caught up in the draft, watched intently from the bleachers; they knew that I and the other instructors had seen the elephant. We were credible and they were within months of shipping out to Vietnam. They would use what we taught them, but no training could prepare them for, or protect them from the traumatic stress of combat, and they would be imprinted with experiences that would change them all forever.
This intuitive process was and remains a mystery to me. Nearly all of the experimentation and innovation came while I was in the studio, while I had my hands on the welding torch, the angle grinder or the forging hammer. When I was in the zone and generating steel sculpture at a prolific rate I felt oblivious to my thirst, my bladder, my fatigue. It was a transcendence difficult to describe to non-artists, a state of being that I slipped in and out of while working in the studio, as if the muses were tossing out scraps of inspiration now and again, and then retreating to wherever muses go on their coffee breaks. Aesthetic challenges popped into my head in the form of questions: what would this piece of steel look like with a bevel cut? Can I find something to echo that texture, arc, line? Can the center of gravity be elevated without making the piece unstable? Critical to my modest success at this point was the ability to be open to the process and skilled in the techniques required to resolve each piece.
My military past entered my art when I saw Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon. It resonated more closely with my experiences in Vietnam than any of the previous flicks I’d seen. It struck a chord. I began to deal with my war experiences through my art. Vietnam had more ambiguity for me than for Stone; more shades of gray in the moral issues that he painted very white and very black. My response to Stone’s film served as a point of departure for my work. Narrative entered the work with an autobiographical back-story that added layers to each piece.
To paraphrase Paul Fussell in his book, Wartime, the difference between a combat journal entry and a memoir is the same difference between looking at the sun at high noon and seeing it at sunset; the former, stark and unembellished, the latter, softer and filtered through the passage of time and hindsight. I was beginning this artistic exploration more than twenty years after the fact. Over the years I had erected a lot of filters.
Important questions arose. How to explore, in three dimensions, the ironies, contradictions, and tensions in the relationship between those who serve at great personal risk and those who benefit from their sacrifice at little or no personal cost? How to keep the viewer engaged in a discovery process with military icons and imagery? And what, exactly, was I trying to communicate to the viewer? How to avoid cliché, being heavy-handed, moralistic, self-righteous, sentimental or angry? Resolving these issues would be like walking a slack rope. At all costs, I wanted to avoid the appearance of being just another pissed-off Vietnam veteran. A lot of angry art had been done by veterans, and by civilians who knew the war only vicariously; while it was surely cathartic, much of it lacked ambiguity, subtlety, and grace.
The decision making process, left/right brained, in retrospect, was not as clearly defined as I initially suspected. What I had thought were distinct functions in both hemispheres were and remain really quite thoroughly integrated. The left side is dominant, however. I have to regularly smack it down so that there can be more spontaneity in my work. The left has an inherent need, indeed, a compulsion for order and neatness that disdains asymmetry and all those marks outside the box; it relishes pattern recognition; it eschews randomness. The right lobe seemed to consider the skills afforded by the left brain as part of its palette and draws on it for support at will. The obverse does not appear to be true. The right brain likes to run in the rain, splash in the puddles and play in the mud. It is what you would expect from an infantryman.
CNN continues to broadcast footage from combat zones. The terrain has changed, as have the uniforms and the weapons, and, of course, the “enemy”; but the tracers still arc in grimly graceful curves toward their targets just as they did in the last war, and the one before that, and the one before that. The traumatic experiences on both ends of the barrel are deeply imprinted on the psyches of combatants and non-combatants alike, memories that last a lifetime. There is no recipe for converting those experiences into a meaningful art. Over two and a half million of us served in Vietnam, and there were over two and a half million different experiences. Mine found an outlet through sculpture; perhaps it speaks also for many who remain silent.
