Iraq veterans shred painful memories into paper

SAVANNAH, Ga. --- Tired of taking pills prescribed to suppress his pain, Zach Choate decided to wrestle head-on with the trauma that followed him home from Iraq. He began by using a razor to shred his Army uniform to bits.

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Associated Press

Zach Choate (right) uses a razor to shred his camouflage Army uniform for The Combat Paper Project with project co-founder Drew Cameron (center) in a Savannah art studio. Mr. Choate deployed in Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division. The shredded uniforms are turned into paper.

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Associated Press

Army veteran Maggie Martin shows her Iraq combat ribbon and other service ribbons before adding them to the pile of her shredded Army uniforms for The Combat Paper Project.

"I'm hoping I come out of this a little more whole, a little bit more at peace," said Mr. Choate, who was a gunner in the 10th Mountain Division. "I'm not an anti-war, antimilitary person. This is just me fixing me."

He chopped his camouflage jacket into strips. He diced the American flag patch on its right shoulder, along with a prescription for sleeping pills he found in a pocket. Even the Purple Heart ribbon Mr. Choate earned after being wounded by a roadside bomb got torn into tiny threads.

The 25-year-old soldier from Cartersville joined a handful of Iraq veterans at a Savannah art studio last week to destroy uniforms that had become painful reminders of their combat experience, using them to create something new.

The young vets mixed the jigsaw pieces with water and beat them into pulp to make sheets of paper -- blank canvasses on which they could write, paint or screen images to tell their war stories.

The Combat Paper Project, a Vermont-based collective of combat vets who became artists after leaving the military, has spent the past year holding coast-to-coast workshops aimed at teaching ex-service members to help themselves by recycling fatigues into artwork.

Drew Cameron, who became opposed to the Iraq war after serving in an Army artillery unit during the 2003 invasion, started the group after moving to Burlington, Vt., where he learned paper making from a local artist while becoming active with Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Mr. Cameron, 27, saw it as a way reach out to other Iraq veterans haunted by memories of friends slain in battle and men they had killed, wounded physically and psychologically by bomb and mortar explosions, and struggling to direct their own lives after years of being told what to do by the military.

"It's about taking the things you did and owning them, taking responsibility and expressing them," Mr. Cameron said. "The experience is not simple. For me to translate things that are hard to express, art is the perfect medium."

The finished paper is thick, almost like cardboard, with an olive-gray color accented by fine threads of red, blue and purple from any awards and decorations the ex-soldiers add.