South Coast Soldiers Killed in Iraq Among 1,300 Portraits at Arlington
ARLINGTON, VA. – Killed less than a year apart; the two men – both fathers, both husbands and both from the SouthCoast – stand among the more than 1,300 faces depicted in the “Faces of the Fallen” exhibit at Arlington National Cemetery.
Staff Sgt. Joseph Camara and Sgt. Peter Gerald Enos were both killed in action in Iraq and are now being memorialized in portraits of each man and woman killed since the war began through Nov. 11, 2004. The portraits were done by more than 200 artists from across the country and vary from brightly colored painting to black and white sketches, from actual images to flowers representing the person.
Sgt. Camara was killed on Sept. 1, 2003, near Baghdad when an explosive device ignited under his vehicle. The New Bedford Police officer and member of the Rhode Island National Guard was 40.
Army Sgt. Enos was killed on April 9, 2004, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his patrol vehicle in Bayji, about 120 miles north of Baghdad. The 24-year-old was promoted from specialist to sergeant posthumously.
The exhibit, which opened on March 22 and will close on Nov. 11, displays portraits arranged in order of the soldiers’ deaths, surrounded by objects visitors have left behind, such as photos, dog tags, flowers, poems and messages from loved ones or comrades.
Visitors to the exhibit walk slowly along, pausing for a moment to lean forward or bend down for a closer view, commenting on the artwork and often on how young the soldier was.
Some of the portraits show the soldier in uniform, others in casual clothes. One portrayed a soldier in a James Dean pose, smoking a cigarette and leaning off to the side. Others were images of part of the soldier’s face standing out on the cream canvas.
Susan Carney and Sarah Huntington collaborated on Sgt. Enos’ portrait to create a collage with layers of words and paint and an image of Sgt. Enos’ face in the middle, tilted to the side with his name, age and hometown written below the image.
The collage includes the words “Six Nations,” which is from an old treaty between the federal government and Indian tribes, Ms. Carney said.
Ms. Carney, a painter and printmaker from Shepherdstown, W.Va., said she used the treaty to symbolize the correlation between America’s involvement in Iraq and its connection with Native American tribes, and specifically the process of bringing democracy to a country that has never had it before.
She said the idea came to mind after she first sat down to work on the portraits.
“When I started doing this project, the first thing I did was I sat down and tried to make it clear in my mind why they had died,” she said.
Each artist was given photos or images of soldiers killed in a 24-hour period, and told to create a portrait of each soldier.
“It was a very meaningful experience to portray 10 people that way that we’d never met,” Ms. Huntington, of Lincoln, Va., said, adding that she will always remember their faces. “You did feel like you sort of got to know them a little bit.”
Ms. Carney agreed, saying she felt very attached to the men whose portraits she worked on even though she had never met them.
“It certainly made the war more real for me,” she said, adding that she still had the soldiers’ photos in her journal.
Ms. Carney said she tried to show how the soldiers she portrayed were related by adding a rope in the background of the 10 she depicted
“Even though they didn’t know it, they had that kind of strange bond that they all died on the same day,” she said. “If you put them all in a line–a straight horizontal line–you can see the rope.”
Ms. Huntington said although she and Ms. Carney “don’t agree with the war, [they] tried not to put that in the artwork” out of consideration for the families.
“I just think you have to respect the family’s feelings; no matter how they felt about it they lost somebody,” the photographer said. “I tried to keep my politics out of it.”
Jenny Freestone, a printmaker from Takoma Park, Md., created Sgt. Camara’s portrait by doing a detailed pencil drawing and also making a black and white copier transfer of him wearing his New Bedford police hat.
Ms. Freestone said she would remember most the vulnerability of the soldiers, both young and old, because it was something that was very upsetting to her.
Her greatest struggle in creating the portraits, she said, was “the emotional difficulty of realizing what you are trying to draw.”
She said she focused most on the eyes. “They were very important to me because that’s where you connect with me.”
She also said she “tried to tease out personalities from faces” she worked on but found it “difficult to do them justice.”
“Obviously you start to think about the person, who were they, what were they like,” Ms. Freestone said. “It kind of helped to think about the person as a person and try and put that back into the drawing, but the bottom line was that you knew that you were drawing this son, this husband, this brother, this sister for the family left behind.”
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