How Art Heals the Wounds of War
In making a mask, soldiers who suffer brain injuries put a face to their pain.
The cover of the February issue of National Geographic shows retired Marine Gunnery Sgt. Aaron Tam holding a mask that exposes a brain. It's a representation of Tam's own brain, a brain subjected to more than 300 blast force explosions, a brain also repeatedly probed by neuroimaging machines to diagnose his injuries.
But the high-tech machinery of science can reveal only so much. It was the mask created in a program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, that exposed the psychological pain caused by blast force—the insidiously invisible and signature injury of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.
National Geographic spoke with Melissa Walker, an art therapist who
