Vietnam veteran documented war

June 16, 2009 09:17 am

— ARGYLE, Texas (AP) — Don Schol is a Vietnam veteran and no stranger to the horror of war. But from the moment he arrived in 1967, his experience was destined to be different.
The Pan Am jet from San Francisco had just touched down at the Saigon airport. A jeep pulled up and a captain barked, "Schol, come with me." At U.S. Army headquarters, he met a colonel who told him he would be using his talent as an artist to document the war for posterity.
He would carry an M-16, a .45 and an artist's sketchbook.
"Our job," Schol says, "was to document the war like no other war had ever been documented."
Schol was appointed the head of a team of combat artists who from October 1967 to April 1968 crisscrossed Vietnam to paint, sculpt, shoot pictures and, like every other soldier, try to survive which posed the biggest challenge.
"I have always been a dove," Schol says. "Vietnam made me even more of one."
Schol's work and that of the four enlisted men he supervised as artists became permanent fixtures in the U.S. Army Office of Military History, where it remains in Washington, D.C. But what he saw and felt has never left the Argyle resident, who, at 67, remembers all too well the enduring terror of Vietnam.
An exhibition of Schol's work is on view through Saturday at Photographs Do Not Bend on Dragon Street in the Dallas Design District. It consists of 16 wood-cut prints that Schol hopes will "grab people, make them think about what they're seeing. I want them to realize ... this could be any war." (Those who wish to buy individual prints can do so for $600 each.)
Schol has taught at the University of North Texas since 1969, just after he left Vietnam. Even now, he finds it hard to escape the grim effects of war, which in his mind too many people take for granted. These days, he's lamenting the departure of one of his UNT graduate students who was recently sent to Iraq for a second time to finish out his reserve commitment. More than 40 years later, Schol is still coping with his own war, which caused his best friend to take his life soon after coming home.
Burt Finger, the co-owner of Photographs Do Not Bend, served in Vietnam during 1968 and 1969 with the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion stationed in Dak To. He says Schol's exhibition "has brought back a lot of really hard memories. The pieces are so real to me, so vivid. The first time I saw them in his studio, there were actually tears in my eye. It was almost too much for me to look at, it was so emotional."
Finger is especially moved by Angel of Mercy, which shows a helicopter with angel wings, the kind that flew him to safe harbor after he was wounded. More than anything, he says, Schol's artwork portrays the horror of war but does so "with a feather and not a sledgehammer."
"It's the responsibility of returning soldiers to try to relate to others the horror and the misery of war," Finger says. "It's not something you ever walk away from."
As soon as they arrived, Schol and his team of artists hooked up with the 3rd brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, the same unit depicted in Apocalypse Now. Death arrived quickly.
"More so than battlefields with bodies lying all around, it was the existential moments that always went the deepest," Schol says. "For me, seeing an individual at the moment of death was the hardest." It was also an existential moment to have someone shoot at him, which he says made the war "very, very personal."
Schol remembers a moment with the 25th Infantry when he was visiting soldiers huddled in a tent. He left, and no more than a minute later, watched a mortar round engulf the tent, killing everyone inside.
"I was moved by the whole experience," he says, "but what saved me was my philosophy, my outlook, my ability to put things in perspective. I was not unfamiliar with the atrocities of war." His father had, for six months during World War II, been a prisoner of war, held captive by the Nazis. He now realizes that even his father suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Born in Buffalo Center, Iowa, Schol and his family moved to Dallas when he was 5. He graduated from Jesuit High School and the University of Dallas before pursuing graduate work in philosophy and art at the University of Texas. When his student deferment ended, he enlisted in officer candidate school to avoid being drafted.
With the "in country" phase of his service over, he and his artists headed to Hawaii to spend six months finishing and showing their work, which he says was "completely uncensored." But he remembers being surprised, even shocked, by the hostile reception. Because of protests, the University of Hawaii declined to host the exhibition. A Honolulu art dealer showed it instead.
Spat on in San Francisco, a chastened Schol returned to Texas and joined the North Texas faculty in 1969. Initially, he taught photography and had Burt Finger as one of his first students.
For 20 years after Vietnam, Schol suffered nightmares but never sought professional help. For 20 years after that, art lingered as therapy. Last summer, he met Santa Fe, N.M., art dealer Fred Kline, a close friend of Schol's and fellow artist Richard Strong, who, unable to free himself of the horrors of Vietnam, committed suicide. Kline looked at Schol's work and said, "You must finish this."
Influenced by German expressionism, Schol chose black-and-white wood-cut prints for their ability to convey graphic images. During his combat artist days, he had worked entirely as a sculptor, evoking scenes of war from pieces of clay.
In the show at Photographs Do Not Bend, one image shows a Vietnamese man being yanked one way by an American eagle and the other way by an Asian dragon. Schol sees the symbolism of Vietnam as exactly that a people hopelessly torn by competing ideologies.
Another image shows an American soldier being shot and his spirit ascending to the heavens. Another twist of fate, and it could have been Schol. "Even that," he says, "is a thought that stays with you. You never stop wondering, 'Why them ... and not me?'