Auburn, N.Y. – The Vietnam War made a lasting impression on Syracuse artist Paul Pearce. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967, he was deployed to Vietnam in 1968 as an artillery forward observer.

“I should never have been a soldier, and yet I was a good soldier,” Pearce said. “I knew what I did was wrong. I wanted everyone else to know what we were doing to Vietnam and that our country was wrong.

“For this reason, I am haunted by what I did and what I witnessed,” he continued. “When people say, ‘Thank you for your service,’ my reply is, ‘Don’t thank me for my service; you don’t know what I did. My country made me do it and I was just a kid.’”

Pearce turned to photography to deal with his trauma, and the Schweinfurth Art Center is hosting a retrospective of his work, titled “i solemnly swe

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