NATO??? Since when does NATO declare wars? If they want to protest go to Congress or the White House. When are we ever going to learn that “The Military Does Not Start The Wars”?
Slone graduated from an Ohio high school, got a car and an apartment and worked at a GM factory making car parts. One day, she realized she made the same amount of money as workers who’d been there 18 years. In 2002, she decided she’d have a better chance at escaping rural Ohio and finding a better living by joining the Air Force.
“It was no big ‘I wanna serve my country’ thing, I was a victim of the economic draft,” she said.
Her first station was in Ohio, ironically, but then she was deployed to locations in Qatar and Iraq. She spent part of 2006 in Mosul, Iraq. “We were constantly getting mortared and RPGed,” she said.
She was good at what she did, and was promoted to E5 Staff Sergeant, but started feeling misgivings about the value of war and her place in life. Serving under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as a gay woman became grating.
Slone was discharged in 2008, and decided to immediately enter Ohio State University to study art. She was scared because of the lousy economy, but also because she wasn’t sure if art was a selfish choice.
Transitioning from a staff sergeant to an art student wasn’t easy, starting from the first day of every class, when students introduce themselves. The moment she’d introduced herself as a veteran, she was met by blank faces.
Slone doesn’t think of her work as a deliberate comment on war or the military, but finds that writing and sculpting has become her way of remembering her experiences. She recalls very little of her military experiences until she starts making art and forming a narrative.