Over lunch in the mess tent, I communicated with one of the woman, who had invited me to sit with the troops for lunch, using Google Translate. The app doesn’t make it easy to switch back and forth between languages but after a while we managed to get a conversation going.
As I started doing the sketch of people eating lunch, she walked over to the woman in my sketch and told her to sit still since I was sketching. The pressure was on to be sure to include that woman in the sketch. Ink is an unforgiving medium but I did manage to get her situated in the sketch.
The woman I had been communicating with let me know that the green car parked across from us belonged to her family. She hoped that I would sketch it and I was glad to oblige. Her car looked like a 1942 Plymouth Staff car. All 1942 Plymouth’s are rare. Car production stopped in mid-February of that year, as factories were converted for the World War II effort. Plymouth built 5,821 such Town Sedans. Five are known to exist; two are operational. Now I am no expert on vintage autos, so I might have the year or model off by a notch but this looks like a rare beauty.
The other vehicle looks like a troop carrier truck with a circular mount above the cab for a machine gun mount. The 75th infantry soldiers would have been moved in such a vehicle. When the engine turns over in these trucks they sound like a true hollow monster.
The cabin in the sketch was a store that showcased products used by the American troops. A person can be seen trying to peer inside, from behind the American flag The radio was broadcasting the song, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.
While doing this sketch, a man sat next to me and told me about how overwhelmed he had been on the day the Twin Towers fell in NYC on September 11, 2001. He did business in America and had been to the towers several time. He wasn’t sure which tower he had been in. I told him that I used to drop art portfolios off at the twin towers, and like him I wasn’t exactly sure which tower I had been in. He was sad to see the direction America has been turning in the last few years. There is no open dialogue anymore once an opinion is differed that one’s own the only options seems to be to lash out with violence. We seem to be falling back to the time of 1939 when power hungry men sought opportunities to grab more power, at the expense of others. We seemed to agree that America was united after the fall of the towers but today America is divided as it burns.
