From what I know he was a solitary old Vietnam veteran, he liked to hunt, fish, and take his motorcycle on a cruise along the winding roads of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He didn’t seem to make it a priority to visit his eldest son, daughter in law, and three grandchildren in Illinois too often. I knew he existed, and I even met him three or four times. To me my “grandfather” was just a person who didn’t really care. I thought that up until I attended his funeral this year. As a child, naturally I wanted to put some personality traits, stories, and memories to the person I knew to be grandpa . I began to ask my dad about him and he told me he was in the Vietnam war. I thought that was really cool. “Oh yeah, my Grandpa was in the army!”, I would think to myself. Not actually knowing my grandfather that well led me to incorporate war into who he was. I would make up stories or exaggerate the ones my dad told me. I did those things to fill a hole in the relationship with my grandfather. War filled that hole. In the visual there is the military issued shirt that my grandfather wore in Vietnam, as well as a question mark right where his head would have been. The shirt in the visual reads the name “Dowell”, but there is no face to put to it. Instead, there is a question mark where the face would be. This shows the lack of knowledge on who the person actually was and what the person was like. The fact that this man was in war is really the only thing there is to know about him other than his name. For me, being the creator of this piece I think it goes perfectly with the fact that war was all I really knew about my Grandfather. War allowed me to create a personality for him. War brought us closer.
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