Frank Romeo

Frank Romeo is a lifelong resident of Bay Shore New York and still very active in community affairs. While enjoying his teenage years at Bay Shore High School he was active in student government and athletics and was once scouted by a Major League Baseball team. Frank graduated in 1967 at the height of the ground fighting during the Vietnam War. With the likelihood of being drafted Frank joined the military after graduation to fight for their country. Due to his physical gifts Frank was assigned to the 199th Light Infantry Brigade a small elite air mobile unit designed for search and destroy covert missions. This specialty unit existed for only four years and was the prototype of today's most elite fighting forces. Living and fighting in heavy jungle Frank lived and worked in enemy held territory while performing daily missions to locate and destroy enemy base camps and munitions caches. While on a covert mission into Cambodia he was separated from his unit and engaged the enemy alone. Frank held off an enemy attack but was critically wounded and sustained several gunshot wounds. Left for dead by the enemy he woke up a month later in Japan and began the arduous task of healing. Upon returning home he spent the next year in recovery and began showing signs of what would later be known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. Living with the devastating effects of PTSD Frank battled his condition for the next two decades finding it impossible to get his life on track. During a crisis Frank had an epiphany and discovered art as a means of dealing with his trauma and began to paint incessantly about trauma and about the war. As a condition of PTSD his stories were too painful to share so he hid his artwork away never to see the light of day. In the 1980's his art was discovered and took on a life of its own while the news media dubbed Frank the first Closet Artist of Vietnam. He began to search out other veterans with the same condition that also used art as a means of healing. He found the subject matter to always be the same, trauma and the war experience. Frank began collecting art created by other veterans as a cathartic release of their experiences and put together an impressive collection. It was then that he realized what he had done! Not only was he documenting American history through art but he was documenting the emotional history of our country.