American Mythos

This is the wedding portrait of Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline. The picture was taken in Cincinnati by photographer Nina Berman while she was on assignment for People magazine. Berman titled the photo "Marine Wedding."

Ty is a Marine. Here, he's about to get married. While we normally find great joy in marriage or getting married, here, no one is smiling.

Ty cannot smile due to the extent of the injuries he received while serving as a Marine in Iraq. He has scar tissue covering over 90% of his head and face. Renee has no facial injuries, and Renee is not smiling either. That's likely due to the extent of Ty's injuries in light of her engagement to him prior to him leaving for war. And now Renee is looking forward to a life-long commitment to a short sale. She promised her hand in marriage to her high school sweetheart prior to his tour of duty, and now she is about to consummate that love on her wedding night to a scarred and drugged war alien. Ty's face is wrapped in pale scar tissue; holes serve for his nose and ears; and his mind, shattered by a suicide attack, is encased in a plastic dome. War has transformed another patriotic young man into an existential Other.

When Nina Berman took their picture, Ty had yet to recover his health. And Renee had yet to fathom what a life-long commitment to an injured war veteran means. And like a crying child handed an ice cream, their community, their friends. the military, the press, the American war zeitgeist scooted Ty and Renee before the altar to consummate not a marriage, per se, but a return to normalcy for the two and their community and a symbol for America's resolve in the face of war. But the only face of war is his. It reflects the seriousness of marriage commitments, the seriousness of war, the seriousness of an IED explosion, the seriousness of military technology and battlefield triage medicine. The sheer gravity of all the institutions brought to bear on this moment pulls Renee's face and Ty's body into a forlorn monument to burden.

Medicine learns a lot from war by treating the wounded and studying the echoes of war, living on in the twisted visages and shattered mental states of its most wounded survivors. Most of what medicine knows about orthotics, prosthetics, plastic surgery, and neurology comes from the profusion of war-specific injuries suffered on the battlefield. One could think of the advances in these fields as the unholy alliance of scientific method with national military recruitment, enrolling the brave and the few to stand in the way of projectiles, bombs, shrapnel, and fire as its subjects in order that it can determine the efficacy of its weapons, its tactics, and its medicine. We have to thank Ty for teaching medicine a lot about treatment: treatment of severe burns, treatment of concussions, treatment of brain swelling, treatment of skull removal, and treatment of affect, the affect of the soldier in the aftermath of a most traumatic experience. There, trapped in his overturned patrol vehicle, burning alive, Ty survived a hell to then come home decorated, honored, and soon to be married to his high school sweetheart, Renee. And there he had to cope with being a grotesque, Humpty Dumpty monument of war's sheer horror and the medical attempts to embalm him alive and memorialize him as a hero. 

This is the American flag. It first emerged from the skilled hands of Betsy Ross in 1776. The flag is a symbol representing, in this case, a new nation. The thirteen stripes represent the thirteen original colonies who revolted against British colonial rule and founded a new nation. The red represents the blood of sacrifices by those original revolutionists. The white represents the bandages wrapped around them in order that they may live to see freedom. The stars on a blue background symbolize a new constellation. This would become a confederation and subsequently a republic, consisting of fifty states, hence the fifty stars. I learned most of what I know about the flag through drill in my Taekwondo class, which Marines had brought back to the United States after the Korean War.

This flag is a symbol, a collection of shapes and colors, the heraldry of which is arcane to some but the feeling of which is palpable to most. Flags have consequence. People fight and die for them. The blood symbolized by the red stripes is what gives the flag impetus, ultimate meaning, power. The bandages are what provide citizens with living exemplars, the war wounded and veterans. These tattered trophies of freedom represent the ultimate sacrifice. To have your legs blown off or your face twisted like a melted plastic bottle by the weapons of war and then to live if not to tell but at least to represent a nation's conviction to its sovereignty then you understand just how utterly consequential that flag is. The veterans were the heroes when you were a child. And so, in aspiration, you joined the effort and became one yourself. The fact is, the sacrifices that make the flag meaningful historically become the impetus for future generations to sacrifice so that this flag can be consequential to future generations of recruits. Ty was well aware of this and inspired by this, and so he joined the war effort. But Ty wasn't fighting for our freedoms really. He was fighting for his understanding of them. Ty was fighting for his flag and all that it meant to him in that particular way that patriotism sets up in small towns like his: "Dad and uncle Joe fought in the war. They fought for my right to be here and live the way I do. And I will do the same." This provincial view of freedom is the key to its authenticity for most in the US. It is draped upon cherished objects, people, and places close to home.

Nina Berman's award-winning photo is all that remains of Ty and Renee's wedding. Their wedding lasted from 2006 to 2008. Ty, then single, permanently so; Ty, then disabled, permanently so, decided to go on living his normal life, propped up on a platoon of pills, some of which he called 'don't kill your wife pills.' Ty had a practical view on objects that related to consequences. When Ty viewed the flag, he knew the consequence; he must sacrifice for it. This flag was a totem for that thing underneath the symbols we use to represent the nation. In the sequence of human actions the flag leads others to march into the maws of unfathomable hell, proudly, naively for the sake of an even more ambiguous concept: freedom.

At the heart of the American mythos are a set of symbols, some visual, some spoken, which are supported by the ideological puppetry of soldiering off to war, sacrificing for war, supporting the cause, and siding with leaders. Behind war is a fundamental desire, the desire to live or to survive. Behind war is a fundamental desire, the desire to kill or to prey. Pairing the two makes warfare an engine of sacrifice set in a theater of war. Upon this sacrificial altar the nations laps up the blood of their citizen, adding flesh to their ideological skeleton. Meaning is created through their sacrifice. This dialectic between survival and state-sanctioned murder supports the nation and its ambiguous concepts. For many in the US a purpose of waging war is to 'protect,' protect what? our freedoms. Behind war is that dialectic, which is, primordial to symbolism itself, on/off, yes/no, good/bad, action/reaction stimulus/response, 1/0. Dialectics is an expression of our neurology. And dialectics is about finding boundaries, segments in a sequence, actions and reactions, differences that make the difference. The very basis of meaning is in the margins that define the relationships between things. War is about boundaries, their protection, their expansion. And nations march their citizens-cum-soldiers out to those margins like communal scapegoats, to die "for God and country," adding flesh to the vaunted rhetoric of nation-state ideology. Soldiers marched out to the margins carry the sacrificial stain of the scapegoat.They are sent to die; their suspension between life and death is a matter of warfare technology to enhance the probabilities of outlasting a conflict.

At its most fundamental, war is about probabilities: the probabilities of projectiles finding flesh, the probabilities of winning strategies and winning wars, the probabilities of living or dying. As for the architects of war, their lethal weaponry enhance the probability that if you're marched out to that margin your purpose is to follow kill orders until you finally succumb to your war injuries and die. The only probability in your favor is the architects' designs to make equipment that extends your life to war's end. And at war's end the soldier-as-scapegoat brings those margins home: war's gut-wrenching fear, its cries of pain, death, burning, dying, its suffering internally, mentally in a ward, in a home, or on the street ignored and forgotten between bouts of drug abuse, its fighting to speak again, walk again, live a normal life back in the bosom from which one sprung again.

Ty tried to return to his old life and its sense of normalcy. Ty died in December of 2013 from a fatal dose of alcohol and heroin. Ty left for war a starry eyed and patriotic soldier, much like many who sacrifice for their country. Ty returned a hero, a miracle of modern medicine, a cyborg of synthetic parts and grafts, sewn together into a symbol, much like those thirteen stripes and those fifty stars. Ty returned a new constellation. But Ty was no totem. Ty was a man. Ty is now dead and the flag waves goodbye.