Goya’s Children

It is a very dark charcoal sketch on two panels, and each time I look at it, there is another story. The raised rifles with bayonets attached, the soldiers bunched up at the wire as if to assault or, perhaps, repel an attack. The details do not matter in this disturbing frieze of war at work. John Plunkett, the artist and a veteran of Vietnam, christened his work “Gimme Some of That Good-Time Lock and Load,” and you have to love him for it. His is the wit of a generation of soldiers used up like Kleenex in our longest war. His art, Plunkett writes, “comes from a diary that was written in my brain. . . . Some of the situations did happen to me; others were bad dreams, fears of what might happen, hallucinations; images that seemed to appear out of nowhere, for no reason.”

In “Vietnam Reflexes and Reflections,” a selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs and collages from The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, the artists are not only Americans. There are several watercolors and gouaches by Vietnamese who opposed us and were killed. These were saved by an American infantryman who took them home with him. This Vietnam book, the first that I know of to show us the art of the former combatants, is made rich by excerpts from diaries, letters, poems, memoirs and novels as well as statements written for this volume. There are snapshots of the Americans when they looked like affable boy soldiers in Vietnam, but in their many self-portraits, anyone can see the boys did not come home quite intact.

Two done by Vietnamese who were in the armed forces of South Vietnam--never a nation, only a name--are among the most haunting. Cao Ba Ninh painted an askew and mournful face, the skin bright red as if from burns, in “Portrait of a Soldier After War,” a human map of ruin. Another, titled “When I Look in the Mirror Each Morning” also by Cao, is made of clear and mirrored glass with shards at the edges, as if the artist’s vision of the world, and himself, was forever distorted. Robert L. Posner’s “Self-Portrait in Medicine-Chest” and Neil Broderick’s “Hi Mom . . . I’m Home” tell a story, not a happy one.

Compiled with the greatest care and scrupulous respect for the artists and their shared awful history, “Vietnam Reflexes and Reflections” even includes a map of Southeast Asia in the 1960s and a glossary of military terms and GI slang, as well as a history of the valiant effort of the collective that became a museum. Of particular value in understanding this marvelous book with its appalling insights is a long essay by Eve Sinaiko. In an intelligent, lucid history of war rendered by artists, she takes us back to an early 12th century sandstone bas-relief from a temple at Angkor Wat and on to later works that are lodged in our psyche. It was Goya, in his huge cycle of etchings and paintings called “The Disasters of War,” who broke with the grand tradition of making war look noble and tidy. Sinaiko reminds us of the wry captions Goya gave to his work from the Napoleonic Wars: “This always happens” and “This is what you were born for” and “Bury them and keep quiet.”

Here are the artists who are his spiritual descendants.