[snare drums tapping, guns firing]
- Ehren Tool: Once you're exposed to war, you know,
that kind of violence on that scale,
I think it does change you in a way.
[trumpet blows]
The guy that went to the war
isn't the same person that comes back.
[engines rumbling]
That's a big, powerful weight in your life.
[trumpet blows]
[dramatic music]
My father was in Vietnam
and my granddad on my mom's side was in World War II.
I joined the Marine Corps in 1989
and was in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the Gulf War.
[soft music]
I thought that's how men became men, was being in the military.
[pottery wheel humming]
I believed in America and I believed in the new world order,
which was talking about that we were the good guys
fighting the good war.
[dramatic music]
- President Bush: This will not stand.
This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.
- I've taken part in things that I kind of question now.
I know that if things had gone this way or that way
in a situation, I would have done bad things.
'Cause war's not like anything else.
[soft music]
Got out of the Marine Corps, and the idea was to go to school,
find something I like to do.
I had the GI bill, paid, covered everything so...
I kind of fell into art.
[wheel humming]
And, you know, I guess coming back from the war,
I wanted to talk about that a little bit,
but wasn't sure how.
And I started with drawing and painting,
but that seemed like, too big or too,
kind of overtly didactic or something, you know.
But the cup, it's a little thing, it's not confrontational.
It's just a cup.
- Erik Scollon: Ehren Tool has gone off to war,
witnessed the horrors of it.
But instead of shying away from it,
he's decided that he wants to address it.
And I love the idea of him coming back
and being invested in the material.
But Ehren has decided to be socially invested
in what the message of his ceramics is going to be.
And it's all shaped around this like simple, humble cup.
- Ehren: Why a cup?
Because I think the cup's the appropriate scale
to talk about issues of war and violence,
and then the shape, it's just the shape
that feels good in my hand.
And that's the way I want 'em to be used,
is hand to hand.
There's over 14,000 cups that I've made and given away now.
You know, it is a vocation, right.
It's something I feel called to do
is to make these little silly cups and give 'em away.
[dramatic music]
I use lots of different molds.
People let me borrow their insignia
and I'll make a mold.
And then, I make them a set of cups with their insignia
that they write on it.
And then, a bunch of the other stuff is just toys.
You know, this is the gas mask I wore in the '91 Gulf War,
thinking that the air was poisoned.
And now it's a toy for ages six and up.
It's kind of surreal to see how military culture
is translated into civilian culture.
My wife calls my work war awareness art.
You know, I'm not so concerned
if you're for or against a specific war,
but that you're ignorant of what's happening is,
is not okay with me.
I think, you know, when the cups are the best
is when they spark a conversation
between somebody who knows what the images are
and somebody who doesn't.
I think most people who've been through war,
they don't talk about it.
So sometimes I think the cups can be that little spur
to start a conversation that wouldn't happen otherwise.
- I got like, two pieces.
- My son's nine, and you know,
we still haven't had that conversation.
[son laughs]
He asked me, he said, "Dad, how come you were bad
and now you're good?"
And I said, "What?"
He says, "You were a soldier, right?"
And I just started crying.
I said, "Let's go watch SpongeBob ."
You know, I couldn't, 'cause I didn't know
how to communicate that.
[printer whirring]
I'm just putting decals on cups.
The printer I have has iron oxide in the ink.
And so we can print out onto waterslide decal paper
and then refire the cup high enough
that the iron oxide melts into it.
When I use the decals,
I can actually get photographs of people.
And that makes it a little more personal.
Calling me anti-war, you know, it's not that simple.
I enjoyed my time in the Marine Corps.
I met some really great guys.
We did some amazing things.
But I mean, the '91 Gulf War was a cakewalk
compared to what a lot of the guys
are going through now, I think.
[gentle music]
[bell tolls]
My job at Berkeley is all the technical stuff,
loading the kilns, firing the kilns,
making the glaze, making the clay.
[laughs]
I'm not the instructor, but you know,
I work with the kids,
but more on the technical side of things.
[somber music]
There's nothing I do that I think is gonna change the world.
But there's nothing in the world that releases me
from my obligation to try.
[gun shots]
I don't believe in memorials,
but I made the 1.5 Second War Memorial.
[gun shots]
And it's just the cup being shot and the cup being shot.
[gun shots]
If you wanted to watch it
for everybody killed in World War II,
you'd have to watch it
for almost two years at 1.5 seconds per life.
[gun shot]
If you want to watch it for the Americans killed in my war,
you watch it for like eight minutes.
[gun shot]
Those cups, all those cups, could've gone unchipped
for 500,000 to a million years,
but a little piece of lead found them
and they're broken forever.
And the same way all the war dead,
they could have had kids and grandkids
and contribute to medicine or something,
but a little piece of lead found them
and all that possibility is no more.
I think that peace is the only adequate war memorial.
[sighs]
[gentle music]
[bright music]
I've been really lucky in getting opportunities
to show my work and make work with different people
and different communities.
- It's like dinner and a show here.
- You know, get the story out.
[wheel humming]
- Chris Taylor: The Clay Studio is a 40-year-old arts organization
dedicated purely to the ceramic arts.
You can see what we're working on here today.
It's just gonna be Jesse and Ehren
for 40 straight hours.
These guys, they're on display,
but they're interacting with our audience
and reaching out to other veterans.
- What time did you start in the morning?
- Ehren: Eight-ish.
- Are you going all day, is that the idea?
- Until we collapse, yeah. [all laughing]
Most of the people that come to events,
I think are just craft people, you know,
but a few veterans show up and it's sometimes hard,
but it's healing.
Jesse went back to the same piece of sand I was at
and had a war with the same guy I had a war with,
and so now my story is overlapping with his.
- Jesse Albrecht: I think a good example of what the whole deal was like for me
is, got mobilized, I was in graduate school
for ceramics, and then didn't have the ceramic, you know,
clay inserts that go in your body armor
that actually stopped bullets.
Yeah, [laughs] like a $100 piece of clay.
Like yeah, that's show biz.
[both laughing]
- Garth Johnson: Craft is a great way to rebel.
And I think we're sort of working with
a couple of gentlemen who've keyed into ways
to inject meaning and inject language into clay.
And the making of the art becomes a two-way conversation.
- How do the ideas come in terms of
what do you want to put on the cups?
- Well, I mean, there's always new images of war,
unfortunately, coming out, and so...
- Yeah.
What is that one from?
What's that?
"We are either going to have a future
"where women lead the way to make peace with the earth,
or we are not going to have a human future at all."
Vandana Shiva.
[Ehren chuckles] Nice.
[gentle piano music]
- Making art and sharing the objects with people,
I believe that's a worthwhile expenditure
of my time, my life.
It's really hard for me to ignore those young guys
that are still out in the sand.
And you know, it's really...
It's close to my heart.
[gentle string music]
[sighs]