The Wake

Wearing full military gear and a backpack full of paper, dip pens and bottles of ink, Steve Mumford spent 11 months in Iraq as an embedded journalist and artist with the U.S. military. When he wasn’t handing ammunition to soldiers, he was drawing portraits of everyday Iraqi civilian life and depicting what he calls the “romance” of war.

Mumford showed slides of his artwork and discussed his experience Wednesday, Nov. 9 in the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.

Baghdad is an ugly city with a great deal of character that can be found if one knows where to look, he says. He spent a lot of time drawing Iraqi civilians in teahouses, which serve the same social function as bars, just without the alcohol. In his drawings of teahouses, he says “the legendary hospitality would really make itself felt.”

Mumford also made drawings of U.S. soldiers, which some audience members critiqued as being too heroic. He explained that soldiers watch a lot of war movies, such as Blackhawk Down, and as a result, young men are going to find war and combat romantic. He emphasized that he doesn’t think this is a bad thing.

“I subscribe to the romantic notion of war,” Mumford says. One of the universals of war is the sort of teamwork and bonding that happens throughout the army, he says. “It’s worth discussing that in art as well as the people that have died as a result of it,” he says.

Mumford failed to connect that it is precisely these kinds of romanticized movies that dehumanize war in order to recruit young men who falsely believe that bloody combat is about heroism.

The many aspects of war he was exposed to firsthand don’t seem to affect Mumford’s view supporting continued occupation of Iraq. Mumford says the war was reckless, and that the Bush administration started the war with an arrogant confidence by sending too few soldiers. He also says that he does not think the U.S. army should leave Iraq, that they should follow it through.

Mumford described how the U.S. troops are creating a clash of culture from the previous government in Iraq, which is having deadly consequences for the Iraqi civilians who simply do not understand American customs.

One incidence of this culture clash happened when several Iraqi cars had turned into the street during battle. U.S. troops fired “warning shots” at a car, and when the car kept moving, the soldiers expected that it was a car bomb. However, after it was too late they realized that inside the car was a woman and her children, who had all died from the shooting. The family was trying to escape the battle, and did not understand that when the U.S. troops fire warning shots it means they want people to stop their cars so they can look at documents. In the government under Saddam Hussein, people knew to just keep driving and not look back if they were being shot at.

“Part of me feels that an artist shouldn’t get too hung up on ethics,” he says. “My main goal is to make art.”