Mike Hastie Bio

My father was a career Army officer, so I spent the first eleven years of my life living in Japan, Germany, and the U.S., from the East Coast to the West Coast. After a couple of years of college, I entered the military in 1969. I spent a year in Vietnam as an Army medic, from September 1970, to September 1971. After I got out of the military, I decided to stay in the medical profession, and graduated from nursing school inn 1979. Five years later, I started to experience severe Post-Traumatic Stress from being in the military. Like so many other Vietnam veterans I have know, betrayal became the life or death issue with me. I lived a life of emotional isolation, and felt so often that I could no longer live in America. I had been an avid photographer, starting in Vietnam, and for years working in the anti-war movement. Using hundreds of images to draw from, I used my photography to navigate my way through the trauma of hidden conflicts, not only from Vietnam, but the conflicts of a very painful childhood. Over the past twenty years, I have displayed my work in many venues. My most recent work has been the pictures I took at the Winter Soldier II Investigation, in Silver Spring, Maryland in March 2008. For four days, inspired by the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier hearings in 1971, Iraq Veterans Against the War testified to atrocities they committed or witnessed while deployed in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Several months after these hearings, Haymarket Books, published a book about this event. “ Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan—Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations,” is one of the most critical accounts of America’s war crimes in the Middle East. In this publication, are twenty-three of the images I took at Winter Soldier II.

For the past thirty-three years, I have lived in Portland, Oregon. During that time, I have spoken in just about every high school in that area about the Vietnam War. Presently, I am working on a lengthy photo essay, that I hope will be published in the next year.