(pounding)
- I think I started with ceramics
because of the material that it was
When you work with it, it changes.
You have to know how to hard push and how hard not to.
It's this battle of control and non-control.
In one way, I'm a control freak and I think
clay just kicks me in the teeth all the time.
My first encounter with clay happened during Vietnam
and I didn't know it was clay.
We had crossed a river and came out
of the water and went up a hillside.
The hillside was very slippery.
So every few steps you would fall down
and come face to face with clay.
(slapping)
- [Narrator] Nearly 50 years later,
Thomas has fully embraced clay, and he uses it
to tell the stories of where he's been.
- War tablets are a historical record of my time in Vietnam
but they're more than that because now I'm getting
people the word on the other side.
It goes up to the top.
War is not just about soldiers, it's about civilians.
When I look at these, if I allow myself,
I get pretty emotional but I just do that
probably on my own at night in here.
(soft guitar music)
This image is of my medic doc, Bill Dorac.
He set up his medicines and all the kids came over
and he took care of their aches and pains
and we were moving out to our night position.
We were ambushed.
Just outside of this village
(gunfire)
and a number of people were killed.
- [Interviewer] Why did you chose this photo for this piece?
- I think it has to do with capturing
some happiness in a (bleep) situation.
- [Narrator] Thomas grew up outside Sacramento, California.
Entering high school, he was just four foot eleven
but his size didn't stop him.
- I was a jock in high school.
I was on the third string, part of the mosquito back field.
I think 'bout 1964 is when I knew I was gonna go to Vietnam
and going to Vietnam was not about carrying a flag.
It was about a rite of passage.
It was about can I do this.
Our mission was more search and destroy.
One day we were out on patrol and I was going to walk
around and check the area and I stepped
on what is called a bouncing Betty
and it's a mine that explodes out of the ground, initially,
and then it blows up in the air and is designed
to take your head off, and when then one I stepped on
came out of the ground, it came out sideways
and I received multiple fragments from that.
I was very lucky, very lucky.
We had a guy a month and a half earlier
step on one and lost his head.
I work in a way that work creates work that creates ideas
and I kept coming up with these three red dots,
three red circles on these pieces
and I realized they were three suns, S-U-N-S
and they were John Mills, Dwayne Papke, and Jesse Palmer
and they were three guys in my platoon that were killed.
(lighthearted guitar music)
It's important to keep their memory alive, even to me.
As long as I do that, as long as I say their names,
they're still alive and yeah, I talk to them.
When I first came back, I moved up
into the foothills of Northern California.
I had a beard and I had long hair and I had glasses
and so the only thing you could see of my face
was right here and right here, you know, I was hidden.
So I started making pots.
I was making pots to sell, but I didn't sell any.
Nobody wanted them.
Probably in 1985, my life was coming aparts in many ways
and that's when I realized that something was wrong
and then ended up going a PTSD program in Menlo Park.
When I went to the PTSD program, more Vietnam veterans
had committed suicide than were killed in the war
and I learned a lot about Vietnam.
Some things that I had blanked out of my memory.
Up until that time I thought my life was going down a trail,
waiting for an ambush and reacting.
I didn't realize I could take a different trail.
- [Narrator] In 1995, Thomas was hired
to head the ceramics department at the Oregon College
of Art and Craft in Portland.
He imagined he'd stick around for two years.
He stayed for 18.
- I think that OCAC has probably one of the best
undergraduate degrees in the country
but OCAC really teaches you to think
and it teaches you to be an artist.
When I was getting ready to retire from OCAC,
we had this beautiful studio, Joanna, my wife, and I
but I wasn't finished with education.
So closing it off will take that utility,
that functionality away from it.
- But still has my thoughts.
- [Thomas] We developed Emerging Artist Mentorship
program at Ash Street
- Finding the rim here
- We have three or four people a year
come work with us for 11 months.
I think of myself as an artist that happens to be a veteran.
I don't think of myself as a veteran artist
that only works in this vein.
We all have wounds, they're just different wounds
and if you work with your wounds, and I work with mine,
when I see your work, it touches me.
- [Interviewer] Do you think about Vietnam?
(laughs)
- Do you mean how many times a day?
Do I think about Vietnam, yes.
I think about Vietnam.
(helicopter blades whirring)
There's no after Vietnam, it is.
We live it.
Hopefully we heal.