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Volume 5 Update + Upcoming Event

We’re excited to share some major updates on Volume 5 of Bullets and Bandaids — and invite you to an unforgettable evening this June!

Volume 5 Project Progress

Our mission to tell stories of healing through art continues at full speed:

  • 48 interviews completed
  • 22 more in progress
  • We’re aiming for 35–45 final stories in this volume, with several being carried over to Volume 6.

Featured Voices in Volume 5

This edition includes a powerful mix of perspectives from across time, space, and service:

  • A Marine Corps–Pentagon liaison
  • A nuclear bomb survivor
  • Green Berets
  • The Chief of the Waccamaw tribe
  • The son of a Tuskegee Airman
  • A direct descendant of a samurai
  • Ukraine’s Deputy Chief of General Staff
  • …and many more extraordinary individuals

So far, 30 stories have been written, with matching artworks in progress. We’re proud to have 30 artists already contributing — and counting.

Reach: Over 60,000 people have seen Bullets and Bandaids content so far — and the momentum keeps growing.

You’re Invited: Volume 5 Celebration Event

Bullets and Bandaids presents: Art and Service, our inaugural fundraiser. Celebrate Independence Day and help us bridge the gap between veterans and civilians through an immersive, collaborative are experience spanning generations.

The event is June 29th, 6-9pm, at the Columbia Museum of Art. There will be food and drinks available (drinks for purchase), plus a private exhibition of selected works from the Bullets and Bandaids collection. We are still gathering support for catering, entertainment, and auction items – including original art and exclusive prints. Admission is $25 or free for all past and present Bullets and Bandaids participants.

Support the Mission

This project is made possible by people like you. If these stories resonate with you, help us bring them to life — and to the world.

Donate today to support the June event and future volumes. Every dollar helps us honor these stories through art, exhibition, and connection.

97% of your donations directly fund the creation and sharing of transformative art and stories through the Bullets and Bandaids program, connecting veterans and communities through healing storytelling. 

Thank you for being part of this journey. Together, we’re building bridges through story and healing through art!

Stay Updated: Keep an eye out for exciting news about upcoming exhibits for this summer and beyond. We’ll be announcing details for exhibits through 2025 in the coming weeks, so be sure to stay tuned!

Thank you for being an integral part of the Bullets and Bandaids community. Together, we are making strides in tearing down social barriers and promoting healing through the power of storytelling, art, and now music.

Warm regards,
Robert LeHeup
Executive Director

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Bullets and Bandaids Gaining Momentum in 2025

2024 was a monumental year for Bullets and Bandaids that saw our mission expand and our audiences grow. Through our exhibitions at the Ringling College of Art and Design, as well as our recent exhibition at the Richland County Library (Columbia, SC), we have grown the number of our attendees to roughly 60,000 people, providing a platform for healing dialogue between veterans and civilians that is both groundbreaking and truly immeasurable. We will continue touring with our present collection and will let everyone know when and where we will be as we move forward.

With a grant from the SC Humanities, we also started our discussion panel series, “Bullet Points,” where we interview past participants about not just the impact of their collaborative efforts, but what inspired them, as well as where they plan to be in the future. This series will continue throughout 2025, allowing us to showcase our past participants and give acknowledgements to those working on our current program.

Having finished almost 60 interviews for our upcoming volumes, some of our subjects include:

  • 5 Native American tribes, including an interview with The Chief of the Waccamaw
  • Modern POWs
  • Tuskegee Airmen
  • Delta Force
  • The Deputy Chief of the General Staff of Ukraine
  • Drones
  • Nuclear bomb testing (including one that was only recent declassified)
  • The relationship between military brats and their parents
  • A direct descendant of samurai
  • Service dogs
  • Private security organizations
  • and the list goes on.

The literary and artistic aspects of our current program also include:

  • Two poet laureates
  • Music, including jazz, blues, and rock and roll
  • Slam poetry
  • Jewelry
  • Art Fields winners
  • A trauma-savant
  • Several forms of sculpture
  • Roughly 20 countries represented (out of the roughly 180 participants)
  • with more to come.

In the coming year, we plan to produce more art, more stories, and more opportunities for engagement between veterans and civilians. One goal is to add a layer of interactivity to our exhibitions, allowing visitors to directly message our veterans, artists, and writers. We will be creating more volunteer opportunities, more opportunities for patronage, memberships that give you direct access to our collection, and sponsorships that not only pay the artists, but allow us to continue touring with the original work.

Through these efforts, and with your help, we will continue to give veterans a platform to speak their truth and guarantee that truth is heard. Through this, we have people from across generations, demographics, and geography eagerly investing in one another, and by doing so, we create the sort of healing dialogue that is both wildly effective and desperately needed.

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We’re All Green

“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.”

-Maya Angelou

“We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have bodies.”

-T.S. Eliot

——————————

We are all in this together.

No, I’m not pointing this out in the hope that we might one day coalesce as a species. That we might look around us and see that we all share a common human journey. That the lowliest of us deserves the dignity that comes with being a living soul. That each of us are living mines filled with inestimable value, where education can reveal each gem in all its glory, adding to intangible wealth that lies dormant in those we walk past on the street. But this is not the case. When I say “we’re all in this together,” it is not about hope. It is already Truth. Instead, by saying the phrase, it calls us to recognize the heavy responsibility that comes with our shared existence. In the military, the phrase is slightly more nuanced, yet carries that same heavy weight. 

“We’re all green.”

Far before I joined the Marine Corps infantry, I knew this to be true. Not simply because this idea was presented to me by my parents, by television and history class, but by the simple observation that humans, flawed as we are, are literally sharing the same planet. The same human condition. It seemed foolish to think otherwise. Mad. Crazy that social animals such as we would intentionally bottleneck future potentials out of antiquated social constructs and the subtle cowardice that can come from security in numbers. As the hip-hop artist known as Immortal Technique once professed, “Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal.”

So when my bunkmate in boot camp mumbled the N-bomb when our black drill instructor forced him to physical exhaustion, the casual comfort of his tone founded in the idea that he was talking to a white man, I was shocked. A flood of ideals tumbled over one another, battling to see which order they should be addressed. Of course, for those of you that went through boot camp, you know that conversation, especially those of philosophical or sociological origins, had no place amidst the guttural swearing, hidden doubt, and panicked anger. So I stayed silent, knowing that, in due time, he’d see what was so obvious to me. That our drill instructor had earned the power to train us, had earned the authority, because he had succeeded as a person. 

Duh. No shit.

Plus, once I was out of boot camp, once I’d finally made it to the rubber-hits-the-road fleet Marine Corps infantry, this would not be an issue. Where the band of brothers was tied together in a celebration of our mutual existence, and of those for whom we’d chosen to fight, juxtaposed and underscored by the lives we’d be snuffing out once we touched down on pink desert. Because we’re all green. And at first, this seemed to be the case. Grated and scourged through the initial months in the fleet, we would pass through the crucible together, bound by a shared suffering and a common goal.

So when one of my squad leaders started dropping terms like “sand-nigger,” sometimes even to the “dark green” Marines, my world began to shift, along with my hope that I was in the right place. And it wasn’t simply the slur that felt like slivers cutting away my skin. It was how casual he said it. How accepting others were of it. Nothing reveals the power dynamic of a relationship like a casual, open disdain, as though it were a universal understanding that one person was better than the other. And that’s when I began to see how this simple mindset could be pervasive. But it wasn’t until later that this rot truly struck me.

My first tour in Afghanistan was relatively uneventful. We had taken the Kandahar Airport in late 2001, bathing in hardship like it was home, frothing at the idea that we would fulfill the purpose for which we had been training. We got shot at a few times from a significant distance, but no one was hurt beyond those people so far away that they might as well have been ants. And in my mind, they were, for all intents and purposes. They were the Enemy, the Bad Guys, and so our moral vacuum was cemented not simply in the knowledge of our part in their demise, but the pride in it. Killing was our business and business was open. But again, more or less uneventful.

And then the second tour, where we took the embassy in Kabul in 2002. There, things changed. The feeling of invincibility I’d had in Kandahar was gone, replaced by the emptiness that the country felt in regard to the value of life. Not because they weren’t special, but because they had to adapt their mindset to the wars in which they had been steeped for decades. Maybe that’s what did it. Maybe we coasted on the idea that we were giving them nothing more than they were used to. After all, it was a different context than simply taking an airport, where you weren’t surrounded by people who were just biding their time to kill you. But we shrugged off the deaths of innocent people, laughing at kids bleeding from head wounds, at people tortured to death. Because in our eyes, they weren’t really people. Hell, they were less than animals. They were the Bad Guys. 

But there was one time in particular, one moment where my life was split into two pieces. The time before… and the time after. One night I was on a roving post, where I would wander the compound, relieving people of their positions when they needed to relieve themselves, acting as backup if the perimeter was being attacked. At one point, we were told that our enemy might be guarding the compound across the street. But instead of lifting their weapon to take aim, one of them raised a homemade flute to their lips, playing a melody that pierced not simply the cold silence of the moment, but the human I thought I was. 

He might as well have been green.

Later, I would think about my squad leader, who so callously threw about slurs like a spoiled boy-king. I thought about my dark green brothers who would return to a country run by those who would spit on them, like spoiled hippies spit on veterans when returning from Vietnam. How our society would allow it, buying yellow ribbons to put on their cars, saying “thank you for your service,” and washing their hands of responsibility before returning to a system that would ensure those that fought would “know their place.” How being comfortable with guns in the way they were taught would be a threat to those who looked down upon them. To those that benefitted from their sacrifice. How some of us would one day become pillars of cultures that denigrate those very same “brothers” with whom they’d fought alongside. How we weren’t “all in this together.”

But again, this isn’t the case. 

We are all green. Each of us. Veteran and civilian alike. We all fight for what we believe to be Right and Just and Good. That requires hope. But regardless of hope, we all share a common human journey, given to us by the right of life itself. And those that stand against this understanding are merely avoiding a heavy truth. They’re escaping a stark reality in exchange for the lazy, ignorant path of least resistance,. And ironically, they do this because they’re human. Our solidarity begins when we recognize that we aren’t alone in this world. That each of us has talent, capacity, brilliance, if only we’re allowed it. That “if I’m deserving of dignity, then so the hell are you.”

Our hope isn’t that we’re all in this together. Our hope, and what’s more, our mission at Bullets and Bandaids, is that one day, we can realize it.

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Bullets and Bandaids Vol. 2 (2016)

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Bullets and Bandaids Vol. 1

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