USMC Combat Artists

The New York Times has a nifty article about the USMC Combat Art Program.

“We’re not here to do poster art or recruiting posters,” Sergeant Battles, 42, said. “What we are sent to do is to go to the experience, see what is really there and document it — as artists.”

The program is not the only one of its kind in the United States military, but many regard it as the one most deeply committed to its artistic mission. Like those in the other services, it began after the attack on Pearl Harbor and scaled back after Vietnam. Somewhat unusually, however, it has kept at least one artist in the reserves ready to deploy. And while most of the services have reactivated their art programs since the start of the Bush administration’s “global war on terror,” the Marine Corps’s has been the only one to cover most of the major conflicts.

[-- snip --]

As a result, he argues, combat artists often have to lobby sympathetic commanders to be deployed and do their jobs. In the past the program came under the auspices of the Marine Corps Historical Center, reporting directly to the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, or “close to the flagpole,” as Mr. Fay put it. But in recent years the program, which currently has an annual budget of $20,000 to $25,000 for art supplies and travel, has been overseen largely by civilians at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va., several more steps away.

[-- snip --]

“The Marine Corps is more like a tribe than some corporate organization,” Mr. Fay said. “And the combat art program, we’re like the shamans. We’re the ones who take this experience and try to articulate it.”

By: Brant