Kyle Carpenter. Mike McGregor. Photograph, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2013.
White railroad ties of scar tissue track downward through the terrain of the elongated forearm, usurping the irrigation of the veins, disappearing into the riverbed of the palmar arches. There’s an eruption that flows from an outstretched hand into a mass of ribbon. Attached to it is a head, inflexible in profile. Despite the resolution of the jaw, the sightless eyes cannot escape their ingot heart enclosure. After so much movement comes this jagged end, with a confusion about the fingers. Some seem missing. And yet—counting again—there they all are. It is harder to account for the meaning of this first photograph in Mike McGregor’s diptych, Kyle’Carpenter, the 2015 Portrait of a Nation Prize Recipient, hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.[1] More difficult still is navigating what lies beneath McGregor’s black and white depiction of a wounded arm holding a Purple Heart medal: suffering and the soldier; the civilian gaze; the soldiery gaze, too; the role of the artist in rendering public a private pain; the truthfulness of any representation.
2015 Portrait of a Nation Prize Recipient (Mike McGregor/National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution)
What is the meaning of an outstretched hand when its own arm has been eviscerated by war and its palm now sprouts a Purple Heart Medal? This question has puzzled me since I first encountered the McGregor portrait. And it has puzzled me as being of a piece with the larger canvas of the uncertain civil-military social relationship that has accumulated in America during twenty years of war.
To reappropriate some Robert Frost verses, it is not at all clear whether what’s on offer here is a gift outright that society should accept; whether it is a promise or a bill come due of social obligation; or whether it is some hortative condemnation at large.[2] But McGregor’s is the image that came to my mind when the Clements Center’s Jim Golby wondered via Twitter this summer about “military service as a meme in American society, and how that shapes the civ-mil relationship,” soliciting replies with images that “come to mind when you think of the military” today.
It masquerades a potentially thoughtful critique of how society uses soldiers and veterans—and perhaps also of how today’s veterans and soldiers—want to? do?—portray themselves to society—in a veiled and yet radically emotive way.
McGregor’s photograph of woundedness fits with a contemporary presumption about the individual cost of military service. For some years I have been excavating that presumption, and the political assumptions and social outcomes of predicating veterans legislation on the belief that military service takes something valuable away from veterans—that serving in uniform inevitably costs those who have volunteered to wear that uniform most of all.[3] I am alive to the long struggle for official recognition of posttraumatic stress and traumatic brain injury and the awareness of these invisible wounds of war. I appreciate the need to correct Vietnam War-inspired attitudes that those who serve are “the lowest of the low;” the need for the nation to acknowledge public servants who have shed their blood or lost their life defending it; to tally up the generational costs of war; as well as to rebalance the strange tendency of what some call the “TYFYS” attitude—mythologizing on heroic pedestals any person who has served in the military regardless of their character or actions.
Such competing dynamics animate the McGregor photograph. At best, however, it is ambivalent about how to weigh them. The physical wounds are healed, after all. At worst, it stokes this latter tendency, sensationalizing the disaster and pain of the wound even while maintaining a curious restraint about both. The combination enacts its own version of shock and awe: It masquerades a potentially thoughtful critique of how society uses soldiers and veterans—and perhaps also of how today’s veterans and soldiers—want to? do?—portray themselves to society—in a veiled and yet radically emotive way.
…there have been soldiers dying dreadfully in artistic media since before Homer catalogued all the black blood gushing forth from Greek and Trojan warriors.
In fact, to provoke an emotional reaction seems to be the point of the photo. Hence part of my dissatisfaction, I have realized. Because like the bulk of policy work around military personnel and veterans today, it does not provide much in the way of an intellectual resolution for those emotions, or a way for them to be constructive. Like the bodiless arm of the photo, it is only ever a part of an unseen whole.
Portraying the individual human costs of warfare in startling ways is not unique to the Post-9/11 era, of course—there have been soldiers dying dreadfully in artistic media since before Homer catalogued all the black blood gushing forth from Greek and Trojan warriors. From the long historical perspective therefore, McGregor’s piece is unremarkable in depicting a soldier’s wounds. And hence my continued perplexity with my own unease with the image. But then the world came to a standstill in 2020, confounded by a novel virus it didn’t understand, which pained millions in unexpected waves. And as the months stretched on I was reminded of the outstretched, supplicating hands in so much, especially religious, art across the world’s shuttered museums and churches. And I thought of the thousand depictions of the most iconic wounded soldier of them all—Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows.
Takato Yamamoto, “Saint Sebastian,” 2005, Japan.
Artistic St. Sebastians have never bothered me, whether gruesomely or daintily painted. Few artists paint St. Sebastian quite like the porcupine that his body is described as looking like after Emperor Diocletian’s archers were finished with him, as chronicled in the Golden Legend.[4] Most paintings are lavish, sinewy celebrations of the male body with the most ridiculously ineffectual archery job there could ever be. They are deliberate in their invitation for lingering eyes, Perugino's version in the Borghese Gallery, or Delacroix's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, in part because they do not always neglect the mental anguish of pierced flesh and physical trauma, Andrea Mantegna's version in the Kunsthistorisches Museum; Vincent de Kastav's fresco in Croatia; even Takato Yamamoto’s 2005 rendering.
But in Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum is Josse Lieferinxe’s St. Sebastian, whose flesh-piercing arrows take on quite the currently relevant cultural significance.[5]
Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken (Josse Lieferinxe, Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.)
Lieferinxe’s Sebastian recalls that ancient Homeric episode when the god Phoibos Apollo, angered by an arrogant invading Greek army commander, punished the entire Greek host with the plague. Hearing his wronged priest’s supplication for vengeance, Apollo:
…strode down along the pinnacles of Olympos, angered
in his heart, carrying across his shoulders the bow and the hooded
quiver; and the shafts clashed on the shoulders of the god walking
angrily. He came as night comes down and knelt then
apart and opposite the ships and let go an arrow.
Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver.
First he went after the mules and the circling hounds, then let go
A tearing arrow against the men themselves and struck them.
The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning.[6]
The episode kicks off the Iliad’s twenty-four books of death and destruction, all reckoning with Agamemnon’s original arrogance. That same suffering has inspired the millennia of pleasure felt by those who have luxuriated in Homer’s artistic spectacle of the tragedy. Reading Homer’s Iliad for enlightenment or enjoyment is not today seen as untoward or distasteful, as though it is some ancient variant of disaster porn. I would argue that is partly because Homer does not valorize victimhood as we do today, monetizing the staying-in-pain rather than the healing of it. Rather, Homer presents an extraordinarily complex account of individual and group-level motivations and choices among civilians, soldiers, and commanders; the limitations of human foresight and human actions; as well as the human heart in agony because of its conflicting impulses about ambition and honor, justice, and memory and desire. And of course—about how one person’s physical, emotional, and psychological sufferings can affect generations of others.
What does that have to do with the Roman, Christian martyr, St. Sebastian? Lieferinxe’s painting in the Walter’s Art Museum is of the saint in a decidedly social context, “St. Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken.” The story goes that when the plague struck Pavia, in Italy, in the seventh century, an inhabitant had a dream that if the people raised an altar to St. Sebastian and prayed for his intercession, the plague would cease. They did, and it did; and ever since, St. Sebastian has been invoked not only as the patron saint of soldiers and athletes, but also of plague victims.
That war means suffering and death to those that fight in it needs no special insight or technical knowledge.
Soldiers and athletes both willingly pursue a certain amount of pain and suffering on the chance that the experience will be the decisive factor in their future victory. Soldiers, especially, often encounter forms of suffering that are out of their control, due to unfavorable combat conditions or inept commanders or just bad luck, when their nation has decided to embark on war and deploys them to the battlefield. Then there’s the chance of wounds or death they have embraced, either consciously, to save a companion, or not, IED attack or an ambush. The plague victim has not sought any such suffering at all; it has arrived cruelly unannounced, from Apollo’s unseen bow as it were. As the number of plague victims grows society feels its threatening existence; and the more that society as a whole assumes the infinity of its own suffering, the more the culture needs signs and symbols to guide its understanding of its hopes and terrors—whether through historical tropes or modern memes, the difference doesn’t much matter.
Perhaps that is why the suffering soldier has endured for so many centuries prior to the Global War on Terror, as an image around which to coalesce pain both public and private, hidden or displayed. The suffering soldier or the soldier’s wound is a type of public-private partnership in suffering—the golden mean between the private citizen and the public face of society, and individual and community misfortune. That war means suffering and death to those that fight in it needs no special insight or technical knowledge. The truth translates across polities, cultures, and eras. It is universally accessible; hence perhaps, universally powerful.
Beyond this thought is an alluring second thought. In Small Wars and Insurgencies, Iselin Silja Kaspersen writes that the soldier’s own sense of identity matters, because it influences “how soldiers interact with society, and how societies respond to war, conflicts, and crises.”[7] Kaspersen argues against the idea of an all-encompassing soldier concept, pointing out that the “new nature of military operations,” simultaneously involving “peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, psychological deterrence, border control, and full-scale military operations,” requires a new soldier typology.[8] Kaspersen identifies seven “ideal soldier” types: the warrior, the national defender, the law enforcer, the humanitarian, the state-builder, the ideological soldier, and the contractor soldier.[9] Despite the multiplicity of functions, still consistent across these seven types is the act of public service and the sense of preservation, of something precious being given by the individual soldier rather than taken. Is, then, the awareness of a continuum of suffering the gift that the soldier image gives us all?
It is certainly a gift that the soldier gives the artist. To return to Phoibos Apollo: Apollo was not feared by the Greeks as the bringer of pestilence. Rather, he was celebrated as the god of war—specifically the energy or rage of war—as the god of poetry or music, and as the god of healing. Despite his war trappings, Apollo was not Dionysius with a creative force of destruction. He was a healer of the body as well as of the mind, a personification of the belief that not only does suffering enable a certain type of wisdom, but that artistic representations of suffering engage the emotions of the heart, enabling them to be presented intellectually to the eye. The healing comes through the marriage of emotion and the intellect, when the human individual both feels and understands the connection between the spectacle of “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” and herself, and acts despite them.[10]
Suffering has ever been the currency of art. I no longer think of McGregor’s image of a wounded arm offering up a Purple Heart Medal as a twenty-first century commentary on the soldier’s sacrifice being the salvation of society. What is offered in that upturned palm is not quite a gift outright; not quite a condemnation. But it is an opportunity, of human engaging and enduring, together.
Rebecca Burgess is editor and associate scholar of The Classics of Strategy & Diplomacy Project, founder and principal of The CivMil Project, and a 2021 Foundation for Defense of Democracies National Security Fellow.
Have an idea for your own article? Follow the logo below, and you too can contribute to The Bridge:
Enjoy what you just read? Please help spread the word to new readers by sharing it on social media.
Header Image: Kyle Carpenter receiving the Medal of Honor from U.S. President Barack Obama, (Whitehouse Photographer).
Notes:
[1] Mike McGregor, Kyle Carpenter, 2013 (printed 2015), inkjet print, Washington, DC, National Portrait Gallery-Smithsonian Institution. https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2015.89.2 The sitter’s full name is William Kyle Carpenter.
[2] I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Gift Outright,” which he delivered on the occasion of President John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. These two verses seem particularly relevant: “Such as we were we gave ourselves outright / (The deed of gift was many deeds of war).” Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Published online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53013/the-gift-outright
[3] See Rebecca Burgess, “Hearts, Purpled.” Law and Liberty, January 5, 2021. https://lawliberty.org/hearts-purpled/; see also Rebecca Burgess, “Beyond the ‘Broken Veteran’: A History of America’s Relationship with its Ex-Soldiers.” War on the Rocks, March 7, 2018. https://warontherocks.com/2018/03/beyond-the-broken-veteran-a-history-of-americas-relationship-with-its-ex-soldiers/.
[4] The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine is a compilation of the lives of the saints, in an array of factual and fictional stories, which de Voragine put together around 1260 AD. It was perhaps the most widely read book, after the Bible, during the late Middle Ages, and thus served as an endless source of inspiration for numerous artistic media. For further reading about the Golden Legend and the iconography of St. Sebastian, check out https://www.christianiconography.info/sebastian.html at Christianiconography.info.
[5] Josse Lieferinxe, “Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken,” (1497-1499). The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. https://art.thewalters.org/detail/6193/saint-sebastian-interceding-for-the-plague-stricken/.
[6] Richard Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press), 1961. Book I, l.43-49.
[7] Iselin Silga Kaspersen, “New societies, new soldiers? A soldier typology.” Small Wars & Insurgencies, June 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342522258_New_societies_new_soldiers_A_soldier_typology_Iselin_Silja_Kaspersen_New_societies_new_soldiers_A_soldier_typology.
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] The phrase comes from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in Act III of the eponymous play by Shakespeare: “To be, or not to be: that is the question:/Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, /Or to take arms against a sea of troubles….” William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Act III, Scene I [To be, or not to be],” from Poets.org, published at https://poets.org/poem/hamlet-act-iii-scene-i-be-or-not-be.