Cameron learned papermaking from his father, a veteran himself and an art teacher. After six years in the army — four in the military and two more in the National Guard — Cameron moved to Vermont and took a $10 papermaking course at a community college. Something clicked. He began practicing the trade out of the Green Door Studio artists’ collective in Burlington. “I was drawn to this idea of recreating things into something new,” he says.
One night back in 2007, Cameron took his old fatigues out of the closet. “I hadn’t put that thing on my body since Iraq,” he says. “I was thinking about it systematically at first. Where do I cut? Well, I’ll start with my left arm. Then I started feeling this overwhelming feeling of empowerment and emotional expression. I started ripping and pulling at my uniform until I was down to my skivvies.” From those scraps he created the first sheet of Combat Paper.
Along with fellow Green Door artist Drew Matott, who is not a vet, Cameron began contacting local veterans, inviting them to dig out and recycle their uniforms into paper. Organizers and past project participants host workshops across the country — often on university campuses, which, in addition to contacting local activist-veterans groups, is an ideal way to attract participants, says Cameron, since many young returning vets enroll in college.
“To hear the ripping of the fabric and just knowing that that’s it — that sound just symbolized basically the conclusion I had with the military,” says Liam Madden, treasurer of the Boston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), co-chair of its national parent organization, and one of the first vets to sign on to the project.
Not all vets are onboard with the idea of tearing up an American military uniform. “The uniform is a token and a part of what American soldiers, sailors, and Marines have fought for over the years,” says Bob Sinclair, National Service Officer for Disabled American Veterans of Massachusetts. “I certainly do not agree with the defacing or mutilation or tearing up of uniforms.”
“It’s healing,” counters Madden, “because it’s taking something that would be sitting in a box in someone’s closet or garage, just old clothes taking up space, and making them into something, something you can express yourself onto. And it’s . . . it’s therapeutic, is the word.”
TURNING A PAGE: Proceeds from the sale of Combat Paper goods are going toward a national workshop-and-lecture tour aimed at bringing help to even more vets in need. |
The paper trail
Each workshop begins with an explanation of the papermaking process. The vets then dismantle their outfits and feed the pieces to a beater, which macerates the fiber into paper pulp. The pulp’s pressed into sheets and hung to dry, with stunning results: paper flecked with white (undershirts), threaded with green (fatigues), and streaked with Navy blue.
Since the Combat Paper Project got its start, veterans of wars in Iraq, Vietnam, and Bosnia, and one from World War II, have contributed uniforms to the effort. When a new vet joins, Cameron adds a piece of their uniform to a reserve stock of paper pulp, a bit of which is mixed into each new sheet of paper made. “The project is collaborative in nature,” he says. “We carry the strain in each sheet of paper.”
