Vietnam veterans share stories

Bloomington resident John Linnemeier had to decide whether he wanted to live or die.\nHe’d been shot by friendly fire during his time served as an army specialist in the Vietnam War. He was laying in pain, questioning the existence of God and thinking about what it meant to no longer exist. He ultimately decided he couldn’t die because he hadn’t yet had a son.\nLinnemeier didn’t die the day he was shot in 1969, and he’s still alive today, able to share stories about his time served in the U.S. military with photographer and IU School of Fine Arts professor Jeffrey Wolin. Linnemeier and his story provide one of the 50 anecdotes and photographs compiled and produced by Wolin for the exhibit “Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans” on display June 15 - Sept. 2 at the IU Art Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery.\nThe photos and essays in the exhibit are samples from Wolin’s book of the same name, which came out in February. Wolin spent more than five years compiling the veterans’ photographs and stories, traveling as far as California and getting in touch with marines, a B-52 pilot, a wartime nurse and others.\nStill, more than a dozen of the veterans on display in the IU Art Museum gallery are from Bloomington and some even have ties to IU, such as School of Journalism professor Claude Cookeman.\n“I wanted to get a diversity of stories,” Wolin said. “War leaves these scars ... (These veterans) have a lot to teach us.”\nIn working on the project, Wolin encountered many veterans with missing limbs, scars from land-mine shrapnel or who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. He videotaped interviews with the veterans that were more than an hour long, encouraging them to be as candid as they wanted about the horrors they witnessed, the pain they endured and the sometimes unfortunate effects their wartime experience imposed on their minds and bodies.\n“It’s still not a political statement,” Wolin said of the exhibit. “It’s a memorial for the soldiers. It’s an art project about the effects of war – of trauma – on people.”\nEver since Wolin’s friends who were drafted or volunteered for war returned and shared their remarkable experiences with him, Wolin felt compelled to create some type of art on the subject of war. In 1991, he initiated the project, but it was soon put on the back burner while he pursued another venture he’d started. Wolin began seeking out veterans again in 2003 for the project.\n“It looked to me in 2003 that we were heading toward another Vietnam,” he said.\nWolin’s videotaped interviews will play on a loop in the gallery room so spectators can hear the veterans’ voices in addition to reading their stories and seeing their photographs.\nIn addition to the gallery, which is open 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon - 5 p.m. Sunday, Wolin will be the featured speaker at one of museum’s Noon Talks at 12:15 p.m. on August 29 on the first floor of the museum, where he will discuss the series. \nAlso, Wolin will lead a panel discussion including four of the featured veterans in his book at 5:30 p.m. on August 31 in Room 015 in the School of Fine Arts.\nWolin hopes people who visit the gallery will take away a deeper understanding of how war affects people.