Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/06/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Some of you may know that I'm batting around this idea of doing an extended series of portraits of members of the military and their tattoos. I give you Robert Berns, USMC, July 12, 1950 - July 11, 1954, Item Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Marine Division whom I ran into this weekend while I was walking out of a store. This is why it's always good to have your Leica with you. http://www.kylecassidy.com/warpaint/robert.jpg "I have an Marine Corps bulldog up here, wearing a hat, and down here there's a flag that says USMC underneath it. They're kind of faded now, I got them fifty years ago. It was some time near the end of 1950. We were getting ready to go to Korea, we went to San Diego to pull liberty. As I came out of a store, there's a tatoo parlor. It was like peer pressure. Everybody was going to get them because we were Big Tough Guys going to Korea. We were all 17 years old. They wouldn't put them on both arms, they said "there's a story going around that if you're captured and they see these tattoos, they'll cut off your arm and make lamp shades and stuff out of them." I don't know if that was true or not, but that was what he was telling us. That's why both of mine are on the same arm. I don't know how true that is, he might have just been trying to scare us a little bit. We got aboard the ship the first week in January. I had my 18th birthday on there -- not that I remember it, because I was sea sick. Korea was cold. It's hard to explain, it was a landscape like you never saw, it was all hills -- whenever there was a low spot that was level, that was rice paddies. Which would come in handy, the rice paddies were great in the winter, because they froze over and that gave you a level spot for the helicopters to come in and take out the wounded. Otherwise, it was very difficult to land there. winter had it's drawbacks, but in a way it was helpful to us. In the summer, I guess it was just like any other time. If anything moved out in front of you you were allowed to shoot at it, if it was out in front of you, it was fair game. Now, you didn't deliberately shoot at civilians -- you could tell them by their dress. And the Chinese, you could tell them apart, they had a different look about them.