Jessica Hines: My Brother’s War

“Gary, Untitled Number 1,” by Jessica Hines.

During the New York Photo Festival this past weekend, I visited the “Subjective/Objective” exhibition, brilliantly curated by our former visuals editor, Elisabeth Biondi. Among other stunning bodies of work, I was particularly captivated by Jessica Hines’s project, “My Brother’s War.” Hines tells us:

In 1967 my brother, Gary, was drafted into the U.S. Army during the American war in Vietnam. Because our parents were ill and Gary was our caretaker, I was sent to live with relatives. On November 4th, my brother arrived in Qui Nhon, Vietnam. I rarely saw him again until I was grown.

Gary wrote many letters home while he was stationed in Vietnam. Pictures arrived. Although in his letters he spoke of his living quarters and described the helicopters he piloted into the front lines, he rarely discussed the dangers. Discharged from the army in December of 1969 with a “service-connected nervous disorder,” he came to know his problem as “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” My pre-war brother, a normal and well-adjusted person, had become, according to the U.S. Veteran’s Administration, fifty per cent disabled. He took his own life ten years later.

Twenty-five years after his death, I discovered among his belongings a memo pad that revealed the names and addresses of his wartime friends, some of whom, with diligence, I have managed to contact—thirty-five years after the war.

Through the remembrances of his wartime friends and through my own journeys to Vietnam in 2007 and 2008, I retraced Gary’s “footsteps” using his letters and photographs as guides. I continue to make discoveries about wartime in Vietnam as experienced by its veterans. The visual record of those experiences continues to unfold.”

Here’s a look.

All images Jessica Hines.