Elegy: An Intuitive Chronicle of War
Pattie Belle Hastings and Karl Michel
Ice House Press, l992
Atlanta, Georgia

Pattie Belle Hastings and Karl Michel's collaborative artists' book, Elegy: An Intuitive Chronicle of War, is a succinct and powerful meditation on the tragedy of global conflict. The artists eschew the traditional notion of "book," opting instead for a collection of eight khaki-colored, 4 x 6 inch envelopes loosely slipped inside a paper band of the same color. The band is imprinted with a purposefully indistinct, high-contrast photograph of two soldiers rendered in dull army-green ink. Though the image is hard to read, the result of a coarse half-tone screen, the soldiers' uniforms strongly suggest that they are of officers in the post-WWII U.S. military. A reproduction of a delicately rendered antique engraving of an armored horse and soldier is superimposed over the soldiers' image in a dull purple ink. The radically different imaging technologies echo the contrasting technologies of contemporary and ancient warfare that they picture. It is a reminder that despite their forms, half-tones and engravings both ultimately transmit visual information; likewise, the technologies of warfare, whether contemporary or ancient, ultimately transmit the same inevitable destruction and death.

Three markings are rubber-stamped on the front of each of the eight unsealed envelopes: a sequence number, a one-word subtitle that abstracts the envelopes' contents, and an image of an ornate military medal. Each envelope contains a quarter-folded 16" x 5" sheet of khaki-colored paper. One side of each sheet is printed with green and purple photographs depicting ships, soldiers, flags, light artillery, and military transport trains. The surface is also dotted with similarly colored reproductions of antique engravings depicting medals, armor, swords, cannons, and bows and arrows. Each sheet contains a different collection of images; a few are repeated on several different sheets, but the pages' greatest conceptual link lies in the starkness and anonymity of the photographs themselves. The other side of each sheet contains text from letters written by Karl Michel to his family during his service in the Vietnam War. His text is set in a justified serif type, imparting ironic sense of order and regularity to the emotional and physical chaos evident in the letters' gruesome details.

The text in envelope number one, titled "Sweep," has an underlying universality that connects it to the distant battlefields of human history. Karl's words from 30 October 1968, reveal glimpses of horror delivered with a casualness and a vaguely detached humor that seem calculated to simultaneously inform and calm his anxious family. In his letter, Karl relates his first combat encounter: his company was dropped from helicopters into the mud of a Vietnam swamp. He tells his family of a mission which ended with two 16-year-old Viet Cong boys "literally torn apart as the result of being hit by M-16 fire. Most of one's arm had been torn off and the top of the other's head had been peeled back."

There is a strange dichotomy between the beauty of the presentation of Elegy and the horrors of its content. While the book's text was created during the Vietnam War, the overall package has more formal parallels to the recent Gulf War. In Vietnam, the media presented graphic images of carnage resulting from a country being ripped apart by conflict; conversely, the Gulf War images, tightly controlled by the government, were sanitized video-game representations that too neatly removed the look of destruction from the face of death. In Elegy, the horrors of war are not visually depicted; they lie dormant, embedded in language that has been folded inward and hermetically removed from easy observation. Visually we receive only romanticized and idealized notions that are so necessary for the perpetuation of the war business. Elegy subtly mimics the structure of U.S. agitprop while simultaneously exposing war's grisly underbelly. This formal conflict reflects an important distinction between the personal experience of war and its second-hand representation.

The text of Elegy, written over a nine-month period, chronicles Karl's life in Vietnam and his attitudinal shifts from the battlefield humor evident in his first letter through stages of sarcasm, frustration, victimization, disillusionment, and depression. He finally arrives at a battle-weary state where he begins to question the logic of conflict and the overall structure of the military system. "Wrong" (envelope number six) describes his role in picking up women for interrogation: I feel like a member of the Gestapo," Karl writes as he tells about separating ten small children from their mothers. "Purge" (envelope number seven) concerns "twenty-three-year-old guys . . . taken seemingly without reason, by 'the grim reaper' . . . practically blown in half by a booby-trap." When that happens, Karl concludes, "it's time to quit. It's time to forget any and all romantic notions ever harbored about war and any link it may have with proving or asserting masculinity. Purge such thoughts before they lead you like a Judas goat to a similar horrendous fate."

Perhaps the most eloquent anti-war statement in the book is contained in "Return" (envelope number eight). Karl recounts investigating an explosion in a bunker that killed seven and wounded three. He describes literally finding the face of one of the soldiers whose body had been removed earlier in the day. While sorting through the soldier's personal belongings to determine if he had been suicidal, Karl found photographs of the dead soldier's girlfriend and letters from the soldier's parents describing the gloriously mundane aspects of daily life back in the states. Karl poignantly speculates that death likely came as the soldier slept and dreamt of the simple pleasures he was missing back home. Karl concludes, "I just don't know what it's all about, this war and all these lives being snuffed out. I can't justify it, there is no way.... But that's not what matters ... I'm not paid to think, just to perform as a puppet for some guy sitting on his ass somewhere, aloof from all the grit, the stench, the pain and reservations of armed conflict. I'm just sure his heart goes out to this dead GI's parents . . . the form letter will help so much to ease the pain of loss. But that's the way it's always been; there are the people who think, plan, generally cause trouble through their reckless attitudes and ways and there are those who reap the ill sown deeds . . . the SP4s, PFCs.... It's wild, but it's the charge of the lower class peons, the light brigade all over again."

Elegy juxtaposes the packaging of military pomp and circumstance with the physical and psychological pain of war. Elegy rhetorically presents the abstract military ideals of glory, honor, duty, and patriotism and then rightfully subverts them with the reality of dread, misery, fear, and grief. Implicit but not blatant in Elegy is a respect for a peaceful world -- a humane place where life is valued and cherished, a place where true hope lies in the recognition of the tragedy of our past mistakes.