Military Books - Military Times

Sacrifice is his muse

For a private first class, 40-year-old Poto Leifi skews a bit old. The Army reservist wanted to enlist 20 years ago, but his family convinced him otherwise. Art would become his career focus instead. It was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 that revived his erstwhile desire, and as the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq got uglier, Leifi finally leveled with himself: Join now or regret it forever.

“It was hard for me to look at 19-year-olds paying for my freedom,” Leifi, a multimedia illustrator assigned to a hush-hush psychological operations unit, said in February, just weeks before he deployed to Iraq. “I have my own sense of duty.”

Wholly inspired by that willingness to sacrifice for cause and country, Leifi, of Long Beach, Calif., not only sought out a recruiter, he launched a new creative venture to honor the wars’ fallen. A throwback to the patriotic posters displayed in downtown storefronts during World War II, his “Freedom’s On Me” portrait series is vibrant, contemporary graphic art made to look like antique Americana. Each image is a reminder, he said, that the dead have a face, a family and, most important, a personality.

Look at his depiction of Airman 1st Class Liz Jacobson, for instance. With her raised fists and flirty pose, she looks both tough and tender. A member of the Air Force’s 17th Security Forces Squadron, Jacobson died in 2005 when a roadside bomb blast ripped through her convoy near the Camp Bucca detainee lockup in southern Iraq. Just 21 years old, she was the service’s first female combat fatality there, an unfortunate pioneer whose sacrifice the Air Force community has honored with street signs, monuments and commemorative coins.

Leifi’s tribute to Jacobson captures her humanity in a way cold metal and stone cannot. “I know her first comment would be, ‘Boy, do I have a figure,’” said Sondra Millman-Cosimano, Jacobson’s grandmother. “I think that’s what he captured in this picture: that smile and that magnanimous energy she had. When you were down, she was going to pick you up.”

Since the project started in late 2005, Leifi has created portraits of more than 20 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Six, including Jacobson’s, are available for purchase through Leifi’s Web site, http://www.freedomsonme.com. (The others haven’t yet been vetted by the service members’ families.) Measuring 16-by-20 inches, they’re sold unframed for $25.

Families who commission a poster choose from a handful of templates Leifi created to streamline production and preserve the series’ style. They pick a theme and he personalizes it. Marine Cpl. Mick Bekowsky, for example, who was killed in Iraq’s Anbar province in 2004, is shown grinning during a day at the beach, his arm confidently draped around the shoulder of a smiling strawberry blonde. Army Pfc. Luis Perez, who died in 2004 just three days after arriving in Anbar, appears pensive as he hugs a young brunette. A banner above both men reads “American hero.”

To Michael Colavito, a Manhattan artist versed in a host of media, those portraits are arresting. The fallen “have left something for art,” he marveled, adding that Leifi’s slant on the project, namely portraying these troops as mythological icons from a bygone era, is inspiring. Though rooted in “violence and life gone wrong,” this work, emphasizes “the light, not the dark,” Colavito said. “I am a crusader for imagery where your mind doesn’t have to experience hardship.”

Indeed, Leifi has launched his own crusade. Before joining the Reserve and creating “Freedom’s On Me,” he designed shoes and made vintage posters advertising prohibition-era speakeasies. As the art world goes, it was steady, satisfying work. “But there comes a time,” he said, “when your art can be either substantial — you know, you make your money on it — or it can be significant. The work I started doing with the fallen soldiers, that was a lot more significant.”

It’s not easy work. From first sketch to finished product, Leifi spends between eight and 16 hours developing each portrait. He works from rough snapshots and sometimes struggles to recreate the right mix of light and shadows.

All that time staring into one face “gets emotional,” he admits, and it’s difficult to block thoughts of the families these young troops have left behind.

Leifi has no children, but he feels a strong kinship with the fallen. As a 40-year-old, he said, “I am old enough to be their father.” As a soldier, though, he is a brother in arms.