Vietnam vet serving her country in a whole new colorful way

NEW YORK - Serving her country has always made Barbara Chiminello smile.

“My family was very patriotic,” she recalled on a recent Tuesday morning from her Upper East Side apartment. “My three brothers were in the military, [and] my dad was in military.”

In fact, she was an Army nurse who served alongside her brother Tommy in Vietnam. 

“Both Tommy and I were in positions of helping soldiers,” Chiminello remembers. “I was a surgical nurse in the hospital.”

Tommy Chiminello was a Dustoff pilot.

In letters home, the joy she had while doing what she loved was abundantly clear.

“I’m happy here,” she wrote in one dated April 17, 1969. “[I] feel young and spirited and really love the feeling of doing something.”

But the happiness was short-lived. Tommy was killed in a crash. Barbara broke the news to her family on a military telephone.

“My dad went ‘Barbara! How are you?! Hows Tommy?’”

She recalled the excitmenet in his voice.

“And I knew then that, they didn’t get the word because of the time difference. And I said ‘Dad, Dad—Tommy’s gone. Over.’ And I heard this wail-- like an animal wail--and they were screaming, and it was very sad.”

A Post-War Passion

Now, five decades later Barbara’s still smiling, because she’s still serving her country in a different way. Her medical tools, now replaced with a paintbrush and palette.

“I always wanted to go into art, but at that time it was like nursing or teaching, for women,” Barbara said.

After the war, she taught herself how to paint, and she predominantly focuses on landscapes, street scenes, and still lifes.

“It brings me such pleasure,” she says—smiling inside her well-lit studio in an Upper East Side high rise. “I can’t imagine my life without it.”

But now she says it’s time to share her works. So she’s clearing her walls after finding the ideal venue to put them on display.

A New Kind of Service

“I’ve never seen anything like this!” says a man incredulously, as he stairs at a colorful Lower East Side street scene. “I Iike the way the colors work together.

Another man, asked which is his favorite, points to a snow-covered Central Park.

“The one in the middle there…It’s like a walk through the park on a very snowy day.”

Both men are dressed in hospital gowns, one wearing a hair net to cover long graying locks.

“When you come for surgery, a lot of people are really nervous,” the second man says. “And [looking at this art] really calms you down a little bit.”

Barbara’s work is transporting patients in a pre surgery waiting room.

But it’s not by sheer happenstance that both these men also served in Vietnam. They are awaiting procedures at New York’s VA hospital.

It’s part of the hospital’s recent push to add work by veteran artists.

“What better images to be displaying than those that are produced by the people we’re serving,” said Jodie Jackson, associate director at the VA’s New York Harbor Health Care System.

Jackson said the program is going so well—and with art from so many artists—that she at times feels like a museum curator.

“Sometimes I’ll keep the art in my office for a few months just to understand how other people are going to perceive it,” Jackson says, standing in front of her office couch which now holds several new additions from Barbara. “I like to see their reaction to the art because sometimes that helps me decide where to place it in the hospital.”

It’s precisely that reaction—like the two men in the waiting room—that make Barbara so happy she’d decided to gift her works to the hospital permanently.

“[Painting] has brought me such great pleasure,” Barbara says. “So I’m so happy that I can share that with the veterans who…are not appreciated like they should [be]. I want them to know that I care. Because I am a veteran myself."

And seeing a fellow veteran smile when they look at her work? That’s the icing on the cake.

“Oh, it makes me so proud! It really does, it makes me so proud.”

“My daughter said ‘Mom…you have found a perfect place for your paintings,’” Barbara says through a smile. “And it’s true.”

Once again, it’s service to her country making Barbara Chiminello truly happy.