Biography:
Jeremy Hogan was born and raised in California and began freelancing for newspapers while still in high school. He is a 1997 graduate of the photojournalism program at San Jose State University, and has a bachelor of Science Degree in Journalism....
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Focus:Photojournalist, Filmmaker, Videographer, Documentary, Video
Skills:Adobe Premier, Photojournalism, Video Editing
I went to go visit my father, Jerry Hogan, in the small apartment where he had been living since my mother divorced him and he moved away in the summer of 1994 in Sunnyvale, Calif.
This is one of the first photos I made as a teenager of my father Jerry Hogan at our family home in California before my mother divorced him due to his behavioral issues that had impacted their relationship. After 18 years my mother said she wanted out of the relationship, and she divorced him. Often in the years leading up to the divorce we would find my father home from work early and we knew he had quit another job. My mother said one year he had 21 jobs before she stopped counting. He admitted to me later that he was waking up many times each night from nightmares due to his service in Vietnam. Unfortunately, I loaded the black and white film myself and scratched the emulsion. I was just learning photography when I made this image.
My father Jerry Hogan stands near a campfire outside the trailer home where he began living after losing his construction job in 2007 due to his PTSD. He moved to a part of California to be closer to my sister, but even after me, my sister and some veterans helped him get money for his disabilities, he preferred living in the trailer close to my sister's home.
My father Jerry Hogan drives me back to my mother's house several hours from San Jose, California on a foggy winter morning. I still had a few things to pick up for college, and it was the first time he was going back to the house he had lost during the divorce. He told me stories about Vietnam on the way, but mostly we just sat in silence, and listened to country music on his radio.
My father Jerry Hogan walks around near the place where he's been living near my sister. He often walks around with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Years of doing hard manual labor in the construction industry left him with a body builder's body in his late 50s, but he is no longer able to work because of the PTSD associated with the combat he did during the Vietnam War. In 2008 the VA declared him 100 percent service connected for PTSD, permanently disabled, and unable to work. They asked him to attend group therapy with other vets, but since none of them had been in combat, and he couldn't relate to them, he said he stopped attending the meetings.
Sgt. Monty Cates and my father, right, visit during a Veterans Reunion. It was the first time they had seen each other since Vietnam. Cates had been the leader of a platoon of infantrymen who would ride my father's helicopter to scout on the ground for the enemy. Cates died a couple years later after seeing my father at the reunion.
My father Jerry Hogan is contemplative as we revisit the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day and look up the name of his buddy John H Gruber who was killed in action 1971 during a combat helicopter crash. My father didn't know Gruber had died in Vietnam until about ten years ago.
My father Jerry Hogan shows a handgun he bought for personal protection after some people had stolen from him. He had unloaded the gun, but was explaining how he would deal with someone after warning them to leave if they broke into his house.
My father Jerry Hogan closes the door of his house after I visited him. He has a hard time with goodbyes, and says he lost a lot of friends in Vietnam, and everytime he did he lost a part of himself that he never got back.
In December 2017, my father Jerry Hogan sits in his house getting drunker, and stoned. I hadn't seen him for a few years because he will no longer go to reunions, and I live on the other side of the country. I showed up unannounced after hearing he was having some problems, just as I showed up in 2007 to help him sell his house, and get disability money. However, I was unable to have a meaningful visit with him. He cranked up the music and talked to himself leaving me sitting there in the noise unable to have a conversation with him. I appealed to the VA in the summer of 2017 to help him, but they have done nothing to help him. I also appealed to them in 2007 to help him, and they did very little but give him money, and that enabled him to self medicate. At this point, I have given up on the VA or the United States government helping my father with anything but money every month, which he uses to self-medicate. However, at this point, I am not sure how a person who is broken by war is ever healed, and if anything can be done to truly help my father combat the war at home he has been fighting with himself since his service over 45 years ago in Vietnam.
My father Jerry Hogan participates in opening ceremonies with other Vietnam Veterans in Kokomo, Indiana during a 2009 reunion. The Kokomo Reunion is one of the largest reunions of Vietnam Veterans in the United States and it takes place over a weekend in a cornfield in Northern, Ind.
My father Jerry Hogan sits outside my sister's home where he spends a lot of time. It took a long time for him to agree that he had PTSD because he didn't think there was anything wrong with him. He actually was wounded one day in Vietnam while on a mission to get some soldiers from a battle field on February 18, 1971. As the Americans were boarding his helicopter, and he was engaging in a shootout North Vietnamese Army soldiers, a piece of a rocket from an American helicopter gunship hit him. He should have gotten the Purple Heart then, but he didn't until years later when I filed the paper work. According to his service officer at the Disabled American Veterans, his congressman was supposed to give him the medal during a ceremony, but the medal arrived unceremoniously in a brown envelope instead.
My Jerry Hogan father lived alone, and had few, if any friends, after my mother divorced him. He lived with my aunt, and her husband for awhile, but then had his own place after the divorce. I stayed with him in this apartment one summer in 1993 while doing construction work to save money for college, but the landlord wanted me to find another place to live however he didn't allow me to be thrown out. Veterans of the Vietnam War have told me they didn't fight for the country or the flag, they fought for each other. I went to visit him the next summer, and as we were talking, he looked out into the distance with his usual "thousand yard stare," which is common with combat veterans. I made this photo during the 1994 visit.
My father Jerry Hogan sits in the afternoon light at his home with a Cavalry guidon in the background. He has a difficult time sustaining meaningful friendships due to his PTSD , and due to his addiction. A group of people began taking advantage of him because they know he gets money from the government.
With a beer in one hand, and a cigarette in the other my father Jerry Hogan stands alone outside the last overall reunion for the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry in Killeen, Texas. Some of the vets were not getting along and the association was disbanded after being taken over by some other vets. Many of the vets from the unit had been dying, and many more died after 2012. My father said he no longer wants to attend reunions because he doesn't remember anyone from Nam, and none of them look as they did during his two combat tours from 1969-71. The truth is, we also reunited with some of the vets he served with, and then they died due to health issues related to the war, and that left my father really upset.
My father Jerry Hogan chain smokes while standing outside at twilight during one of my visits to him. He was in the United States Cavalry during the Vietnam War, and the Cavalry is filled with stories about the past. One of the slogans of the 1st Cavalry Division is, "Live the Legend," but they never talk about the cost of war, or that sacrifice is actually a life long issue for many of the vets and their families. While most who don't go to war are left to live their lives in peace, often combat veterans spend the rest of their lives trying to find inner peace for the things they did. One of the vets my father served with, who later became a general in charge of the judge advocates for the army said after the funeral of another vet that he never realized the true cost of sacrifice until he got older, and he realized what those who had died, or been injured in Vietnam had given up.
My father, who never really learned how to play music, tries to play a harmonica after getting drunk in the afternoon during my most recent visit to him in September 2018. I have been photographing him for over 30 years now.
When my father was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and still doing construction work some gang members tagged his house. My father painted over the tags a few times, and then in a rage he painted the whole house camo for the whole neighborhood to see. He said a person from the city asked him to paint it back to a normal color and he said that he would when the gangs stopped tagging his house.
My father shows me a photo of him as a young man serving in Vietnam as a helicopter crew chief in 1969. His M60 machine gun was stripped down, and handheld, and he sat in the front of the door, not the back, which was unusual, but allowed him to see the enemy behind the helicopter while landing to insert troops, and taking off after extracting them. My father said he engaged in a shootout with multiple enemy troops on more than one occasion, and would look for the first tracer from their machine gun fire, and direct his gunfire back in that direction.
On a particularly nice winter day my father drinks a beer and smokes a cigarette in the foothills of the California Sierra Nevada mountains. The Vietnam War is never far from his thoughts, and he drinks every day to self medicate, and chain smokes cigarettes.
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Private Story
He Never Came Home
Copyright
Jeremy Hogan
2024
Updated Nov 2018
Topics
Documentary, Photography, Photojournalism, Portraiture, War
This series covers 30 years of my father’s struggle with PTSD and addiction. He is a disabled Vietnam Veteran who has struggled with civilian life as far back as I can remember. This group is arranged in a narrative, and I think this illustrates the toll that living with a dual diagnosis takes. I began photographing him in the 1980s not long after I first picked up a camera, and I will continue as part of a larger photography and video documentary project. My father enlisted in the army in 1969 and was in the Vietnam War with Bravo Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry, First Cavalry Division, from September 1969 until April 1971, doing two tours of duty. His military unit was a scout unit and began 80 percent of the battles for the division. Many in his unit saw this opponents up close while flying in helicopters or inserted into the jungle. The rate of PTSD for members of the unit is high because they saw a disproportionate amount of combat. Many of my father's comrades have already died.