Tom Ferguson

In Vietnam, we carried these things around, seemed harmless until James Pearson got off a truck, pulled his harness off the truck behind him and… well, the grenade had come loose and was hanging from its pin. Pulling the harness separated the two. The live grenade now went rolling into the crowded truck. A PFC reacted by kicking it out and yelling, “Grenade!” Everyone hit the ground except Pearson, who stood looking at the grenade, frozen. He was killed, of course. PFC Merriweather was wounded in the neck and airlifted out. I checked the Wall in D.C. and he wasn’t listed but Pearson was. He was the first, so the Company Commander named the field where we were encamped Pearson Field.

Soon there were not enough fields for such sentiments.

“Tom Ferguson is an artist I’ve been familiar with for as long as I’ve lived in Atlanta, since ’79. And he is now not producing paintings and drawings; he’s pretty much a sound artist and a singer of folk music that he writes… very interesting, very political guy, and when I put out a call for entries, he sent me pictures of the grenade painting. When I did a studio visit, I really loved those drawings, and he showed me another painting of the nuclear family, and so I picked them as well.”

— Larry Jens Anderson