• 'Vet Ink' shares tales of battle, loss and life-long pride

    Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

    Victoria Parker's tattoos honor five soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there.

    By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

    The five men are not her brothers. But that’s what she calls them.

    The five initials are not for her children. But many who spot her non-sleeved left arm ask if the tight stack of black letters represents her kids. The question bothers her.


    From the top of her booming bicep — where “M.G. 27 JAN 07” is positioned — to the bottom of the bulge — where “B.E.” rests — Army Reserve Drill Sgt. Victoria Parker’s limb permanently honors the five fellow soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there. Images of those those tattoos also went on display Tuesday as part of “Vet Ink,” an exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash.

    “The motto is: ‘Always remember, never forgot.’ I told them I would always remember them. And by putting it on my arm, I remember them every day. I think about them every day,” said Parker, 27, who lives in Vancouver. Her largest, accompanying tattoo depicts the “fallen soldier battle cross” — a helmet poised on a standing rifle placed inside empty, unlaced boots. That was inked from a photo she snapped of the memorial shrine set up for Army Sgt. Blair Emery (“B.E.”), killed in a roadside bomb attack in 2007 in Taji, just north of Baghdad.

    “The tattoos helped me cope and move on and still honor their memories,” Parker said. “It’s no longer painful.”

    “Vet Ink” is the brainchild of Susan Tissot, executive director of the museum, located in a city rich with Army roots. Before the Civil War, then-Capt. Ulysses S. Grant was quartermaster at the Columbia Army Barracks in that town. Vancouver has also served as home to part of the 104th Infantry Division.

    Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

    Tattoos on the back of Jeremy Hubbard.

    “The Army is very prevalent in everything we do — there are a lot of veterans here, a lot of Army personnel and our former mayor was a colonel in the Army. My father-in-law is a retired Naval officer,” Tissot said. “It’s a very personal exhibit.

    “I knew the tattoos told a story," she added. "It’s a very touching story." 

    “Vet Ink” spans military members who served from the 1950s through to today’s armed forces — 11 veterans (or active members or reserves) spanning every branch but the Coast Guard. Each panel details their time in uniform as well as when and why they decided to get tattooed.

    Some of the images, like those gracing Parker’s arm, represent the “memorial” category of ink art that recall the fallen or a certain battle. Among military tattoos — a tradition that sprouted among Navy sailors generations ago but now are commonplace among post-9/11 veterans — are the other three classes: “patriotic” (flags, eagles), “spiritual” (a star, a cross, the Virgin Mary), and “identity,” (a specific unit, battalion or division), according to Kristina Wells, the museum’s collections manager.

    “There’s been an interesting evolution in what tattoos the military would even accept. Our Vietnam veteran in the exhibit and one of the other 1960s service guys who took part didn’t get their tattoos until they were in their 60s. It was less accepted by the military back then,” Wells said. “If you were tattooed, you maybe wouldn’t even be accepted into the Army and Marines (during that era).”

    Later, military regulations were relaxed, and banned tattoos on the neck and face.

    Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

    Christian Nippolt-Vetter.

    The ink also once carried something of a “hidden” code, especially in the Navy, according to the museum. For example, the image of a sparrow or swallow signified having traveled 5,000 or more miles. Tattoos of pigs or roosters were good-luck charms meant to prevent drowning because those animals often were carried in wooden crates, which would float if the ship ever sank.

    For Parker, the tattoos also serve as a shorthand account of her combat experiences for any other veterans who spy them — an “automatic understanding” and a “unifying symbol.” She said she and fellow veterans can read one another’s service history from their ink.

    But for those who haven’t served, she said, there is often misunderstanding.

    “I get a lot of people asking me if they’re my kids. That’s frustrating and hurtful,” Parker said. “The female veterans, we’re so invisible. People don’t assume we’re veterans at all.”

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  • 2,000 gone in Afghanistan: Did you notice the death of Sgt. Riley Stephens?

    Tom Pennington / Getty Images

    Residents of Tolar, Texas, attend a candlelight vigil Wednesday at the old Tolar High School football field to honor hometown Army Special Forces soldier Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens.

    By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

    When No. 2,000 fell last weekend in Afghanistan, journalists were keeping count. But is the nation keeping up?


    Sunday marks the 11-year anniversary of the first American missile strikes against terrorist and Taliban targets inside Afghanistan. The U.S. military death toll has ticked ever slowly upward from the war's launch in October 2001 as a globally watched counterattack to 9/11 through the height of the Iraq War when service members in Afghanistan darkly dubbed their own battleground “Forgot-istan.”

    Last Saturday, Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens, 39, was shot and killed by an Afghan National Army soldier at a highway checkpoint in Wardak Province. The Airborne Special Forces member had three children and a wife. Residents in his tiny hometown, Tolar, Texas, gathered Wednesday night on the local high school football field, burning candles in his honor.

    According to The Associated Press, Stephens was the 2,000th U.S. service member killed in Afghanistan, the type of historic landmark that gets the media’s notice.

    / USASOC News Service

    Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens

    But if the simple cold arithmetic of his passing didn’t get your attention, you’ve got company. Although 68,000 U.S. troops remain in that war zone, the majority of Americans have mentally moved along, military experts say, to the point where such tragic notches rarely rate a mention at the supper table and barely raise more than a momentary blip in the Twitter-sphere.

    “I don’t think it ranked very high” in the nation’s consciousness, said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. “Thoughtful people – even if they have made up their minds about the war – they just want to commemorate it the same way we commemorate Veterans Day or Memorial Day. It merits a little bit of response in that regard. But beyond that, it elicits almost no new policy debate whatsoever."

    “A 2,000th fatality does not affect people's (personal) calculus on mission feasibility or the desirability of one policy option over another. It’s just going to be a sad milestone,” O’Hanlon said.

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    Perhaps that’s partly because America’s lengthiest war has not generated the fatal pace of past military conflicts. While 181 U.S. service members have been killed, on average, per year in Afghanistan, the annual death rates for American troops in three previous wars were higher to exceedingly higher – Iraq: 498 per year, Vietnam: 4,850 per year, and Korea: 12,300 per year.

    The U.S. military plans to finish a withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

    “Of course, 2,000 fatalities these days really means 20,000 wounded because we’re keeping so many wounded people alive,” said O’Hanlon, who describes himself as “a supporter of the mission” in Afghanistan. “So, I think the numbers are pretty high in many ways."

    “The fact that the country has sort of tolerated them, even though we’re still unhappy about still being in this war, is a testament to the fact that they are not huge,” he added. “Most people are not losing sons and daughters and brothers and sisters in this war. And that may explain why we’re still all sort of more or less against it and yet tolerating it. We have a presidential campaign in which there’s no real pressure to get out and yet everybody wants to get out.”

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    Beyond that, giving special commemoration to the 2,000th service member to die in Afghanistan seems somewhat disrespectful to the 1,999th U.S. troop to die there -- someone whose life story and profound sacrifice may get far less acclaim. Meanwhile, the first casualties of the conflict get shoved deeper into the nation's collective memory, said Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive officer and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit group with more than 200,000 members. 

    "The larger concern we have is with that general disconnect," Rieckhoff said. "Obviously somebody was just killed in action there and that person should be remembered and celebrated. But we’ve also got to remember there are widows who have been dealing with this since 2001. They still need support and their families need care and their kids need to figure out how they’re going to school. The price those families pay impacts generations." 

    "Most Americans aren't constantly thinking about Afghanistan. It’s not always in the papers. It’s at the end of very few news broadcasts. Maybe there is some fatigue in the general population," Rieckhoff said. "But I also think there’s some paralysis: They don’t know what to do about it. So, what we simply try to tell them is just make sure you remember the families."

     

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