Born: New Market, Virginia, 1949
Served in Vietnam, U.S. Marine Corps
3d Battalion, 3d Regimnent, 3d Marine Division
Con Thein and Dong Ha
M-60 Machine Gunner, 1968

From the Artist:

My nineteenth birthday: I remember being so consciously aware of that day, wondering how it had happened that I was standing in a fortified tower, looking into the DMZ and North Vietnam; and why. I remember thinking about home, school, friends, the very near living past.

More than ten years later I made this image from headlines, articles, cartoons, the TV schedule, and the stock-market report from the Washington Post edition for April 2, 1968. I wanted to re-create the memory of that day as it was reported to the world by a newspaper that I had delivered house to house just a few years earlier. I added my natal astrological chart and veils of transparent color: all together elements that might determine why I was in that place at that terrible time.