March 6, 2024 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, World War I was not about hellish artillery blasts and machine-gun barrages - or even deception and disease. The war was about people. Hear stories of a lost generation from the sculptor whose memorial to them will soon show this reality to visitors in Washington, D.C.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next a
story from someone you might not know, but whose work
you'll certainly see in our nation's capital soon. Sculptor Saban
Howard Saban has created our capital's first monument to World
War One. It's absolutely beautiful and tells a remarkable story.
(00:31):
You're Saban himself to tell us about his muses and
how he approached the creation of the monument. Take it away, Saban.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I knew virtually nothing about World War One. It is
not something taught in our school system because it's usurped
by like the Great Depression and then World War Two.
And I mean honestly, we didn't. We lost one hundred
and sixteen thousand men, and you compare that to like
Europe where you lose four villages. It's complete decimation. It
(01:03):
was a punch on a nose for this country. But
after getting you into the project in the first nine months,
I was like fascinated. And here's the thing I learned
early on that the way to portray these people that
had been in this war was not to read history books,
(01:24):
because the history books spoke more about what the governments
did and how they proceeded forward against each other. So
what I did read a little bit to understand more.
But that led me to looking at a lot of
images of men getting on trains with their fiances and
(01:45):
their families waving goodbye to them, and then seeing men
on the front and seeing how young they were. And
I came to this realization that had hundreds of people
coming at me telling me, Okay, you need to portray horses,
You need to or tray barbed wire. How about you
put some biplanes in? What about machine guns and tanks,
(02:06):
and then we need to do some no man's lad
and trenches and mud and sandbag. And I go to
the bathroom one day and there on the wall is
the poster of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo. And I
have this voice in my head that day that says,
do what you know, And that moment led me to
(02:29):
the clarity, Yes, you know people, and you know how
to pose people. Go get the uniforms and find actors
and kids and pose them and get some movement into
this thing so everybody gets it when they go look
at it, that this was a war fought by human beings,
and that's what I had to portray. But you say, okay,
(02:51):
there were no World War One people alive to speak
to see what it was like. But there are a
lot of guys out there who have been to war
and they're around right now, and it's the same different floor.
War is war.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
You go.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
If you look at I know, movies of like Brave Heart,
you see butchery and technology has increased the butchery to
you know, massive amounts of people. And World War One,
the one thing I did see very clearly was you
(03:35):
moved from a gentleman's war where there's these these groups
of men marching in unison together towards the other side,
and then all of a sudden, you're going to interject, okay,
we got it now, a machine gun, a fifty cow,
a machine gun similar to a fifty cow firing bullets,
and it's just like, let's mow it down in no
(03:58):
man's land. And so it's massive, massive destruction. You get
like huge amounts of deaths in six hours, in like
the Soul, it's like seventy five thousand men dying in
a day. And I'm not being facetious, and I have
complete respect for the families and people that lost their
(04:18):
lives on nine to eleven, but you cannot comprehend how
much massacre has occurred in like a war like World
War One, and when you do comprehend it, when you
do see when you start to speak to veterans, when
it say you know, and how horrible experiences can be
(04:40):
of someone right next to them losing their limbs or
losing an arm and an eyeball and blood's gushing out
all of a sudden. It's like it's not a movie,
it's actual freaking reality. And then you go home and
you got to like live with this. When your back
home as a civilian, it's like, that's okay, this is
(05:04):
like horror story beyond anything that you could comprehend. It's
like I learned, when you think you're at the bottom
of the basement, there are five more levels that you
can fall through. It began in a studio in the
(05:24):
South Bronx, and I began using real soldiers that had
seen combat because I needed to become just aware and
be able to depict things that would actually tell how
horrible it is when someone is sent into a hell
and expected to perform. And one of the people that
(05:47):
I hired and work with on this project was Ricky's
Mbranno Ricky's Mbrano was a marine. He went to Afghanistan
and he came back completely jacked up, shell shocked, and
that was called PTSD today. And he went to the
VA and they gave him fifteen different pills and he
(06:08):
felt like a zombie. He stopped taking the pills and
then shortly thereafter, one night he decided he couldn't, he
couldn't just go on, and he decided to take a
lot of these pills. And he's lying in his bed
and then this voice inside of him comes up and goes,
you get up, and it lifted him up and he
(06:31):
walked to the bathroom and force himself to throw up.
And from that moment on he realized that nobody was
coming to save him. He had to save himself. And
he learned how to deal without the pills by exercising
(06:52):
every day two to three hours very intensely. And he
worked for me for almost years and he was the
figure for the shell shocked soldier as well as many
of the other figures. He was full time for me,
and he was the body that we used for the
(07:13):
man carrying the flag as well and the soldier who
is shell shocked I used a ranger who you know,
I heard stories from him of like he I saw
a scar on his shoulder and like, hey, Chris, how'd
you get that scar on your shoulder? And he's like,
we entered into a room and this Iraqi stabbed me
(07:35):
in the shoulder and I pulled the knife out and
I put it right into his throat and he didn't
walk out of that room. And Chris is the nicest
man that I've ever met. He has a huge heart.
And I think that there is a misunderstanding in our
society of what it takes to become part of the military.
How functional in some ways these soldiers are. They are
(07:58):
trained to enter into war, they are not trained to
re enter back into society. And so I have a friend, James,
who does very well as a building contractor, and he's
from the UK, and he asked me to be one
(08:19):
of the models. And I was very surprised and I said, well, James,
I'd love to have you work with me. I don't
understand why, but you want to be a model. That's good.
He's came and posed a few times and then I said,
I asked, hey, James, can you explain why you know
what why is this so important to you? Because he
(08:40):
was doing really well. He was bringing a lot of
juice to the photoshoots that we were doing, and I
was like a little puzzled, and he goes, well, okay,
i'll tell you after we finished work today. And so
he comes over. He goes, all right, So here's the story.
My great uncle and my great grandfather were both in
(09:00):
World War One. My great grandfather did not return. My
great uncle did return, and when he came home, he
proceeded to shoot his wife with his service revolver, shot
his daughter, and then he shot himself. And I grew
up in that home, and so it obviously had a
(09:21):
huge impact on him and the ghosts that lived in
his past. And that experience taught me what this war
and all wars are about. I really gave it my
all to show them, in everything that they have gone
(09:44):
through and all their humanity, in a way that is heroic,
that speaks well of them, because this is what they
deserve that. And the reason I'm harping on this is
because I don't think there is anything more noble than
to of one's all physically and mentally to one's country
and then come back and not be thanked. So the
(10:09):
biggest element that this sculpture does is show the transformation
of war historically in World War One, and it is
identifiable for any conflict that has happened since then.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery. And you've been listening to Saban
Howard who created the National World War One Memorial. It'll
be unveiled in Pershing Park and Washington, DC this September.
Go to Sabanhoward dot com to learn more, figure out
how you can support the great cause and great work
(10:44):
he's doing that will move you, and we'll move your
family
And we returned to our American stories. Up next a
story from someone you might not know, but whose work
you'll certainly see in our nation's capital soon. Sculptor Saban
Howard Saban has created our capital's first monument to World
War One. It's absolutely beautiful and tells a remarkable story.
(00:31):
You're Saban himself to tell us about his muses and
how he approached the creation of the monument. Take it away, Saban.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I knew virtually nothing about World War One. It is
not something taught in our school system because it's usurped
by like the Great Depression and then World War Two.
And I mean honestly, we didn't. We lost one hundred
and sixteen thousand men, and you compare that to like
Europe where you lose four villages. It's complete decimation. It
(01:03):
was a punch on a nose for this country. But
after getting you into the project in the first nine months,
I was like fascinated. And here's the thing I learned
early on that the way to portray these people that
had been in this war was not to read history books,
(01:24):
because the history books spoke more about what the governments
did and how they proceeded forward against each other. So
what I did read a little bit to understand more.
But that led me to looking at a lot of
images of men getting on trains with their fiances and
(01:45):
their families waving goodbye to them, and then seeing men
on the front and seeing how young they were. And
I came to this realization that had hundreds of people
coming at me telling me, Okay, you need to portray horses,
You need to or tray barbed wire. How about you
put some biplanes in? What about machine guns and tanks,
(02:06):
and then we need to do some no man's lad
and trenches and mud and sandbag. And I go to
the bathroom one day and there on the wall is
the poster of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo. And I
have this voice in my head that day that says,
do what you know, And that moment led me to
(02:29):
the clarity, Yes, you know people, and you know how
to pose people. Go get the uniforms and find actors
and kids and pose them and get some movement into
this thing so everybody gets it when they go look
at it, that this was a war fought by human beings,
and that's what I had to portray. But you say, okay,
(02:51):
there were no World War One people alive to speak
to see what it was like. But there are a
lot of guys out there who have been to war
and they're around right now, and it's the same different floor.
War is war.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
You go.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
If you look at I know, movies of like Brave Heart,
you see butchery and technology has increased the butchery to
you know, massive amounts of people. And World War One,
the one thing I did see very clearly was you
(03:35):
moved from a gentleman's war where there's these these groups
of men marching in unison together towards the other side,
and then all of a sudden, you're going to interject, okay,
we got it now, a machine gun, a fifty cow,
a machine gun similar to a fifty cow firing bullets,
and it's just like, let's mow it down in no
(03:58):
man's land. And so it's massive, massive destruction. You get
like huge amounts of deaths in six hours, in like
the Soul, it's like seventy five thousand men dying in
a day. And I'm not being facetious, and I have
complete respect for the families and people that lost their
(04:18):
lives on nine to eleven, but you cannot comprehend how
much massacre has occurred in like a war like World
War One, and when you do comprehend it, when you
do see when you start to speak to veterans, when
it say you know, and how horrible experiences can be
(04:40):
of someone right next to them losing their limbs or
losing an arm and an eyeball and blood's gushing out
all of a sudden. It's like it's not a movie,
it's actual freaking reality. And then you go home and
you got to like live with this. When your back
home as a civilian, it's like, that's okay, this is
(05:04):
like horror story beyond anything that you could comprehend. It's
like I learned, when you think you're at the bottom
of the basement, there are five more levels that you
can fall through. It began in a studio in the
(05:24):
South Bronx, and I began using real soldiers that had
seen combat because I needed to become just aware and
be able to depict things that would actually tell how
horrible it is when someone is sent into a hell
and expected to perform. And one of the people that
(05:47):
I hired and work with on this project was Ricky's
Mbranno Ricky's Mbrano was a marine. He went to Afghanistan
and he came back completely jacked up, shell shocked, and
that was called PTSD today. And he went to the
VA and they gave him fifteen different pills and he
(06:08):
felt like a zombie. He stopped taking the pills and
then shortly thereafter, one night he decided he couldn't, he
couldn't just go on, and he decided to take a
lot of these pills. And he's lying in his bed
and then this voice inside of him comes up and goes,
you get up, and it lifted him up and he
(06:31):
walked to the bathroom and force himself to throw up.
And from that moment on he realized that nobody was
coming to save him. He had to save himself. And
he learned how to deal without the pills by exercising
(06:52):
every day two to three hours very intensely. And he
worked for me for almost years and he was the
figure for the shell shocked soldier as well as many
of the other figures. He was full time for me,
and he was the body that we used for the
(07:13):
man carrying the flag as well and the soldier who
is shell shocked I used a ranger who you know,
I heard stories from him of like he I saw
a scar on his shoulder and like, hey, Chris, how'd
you get that scar on your shoulder? And he's like,
we entered into a room and this Iraqi stabbed me
(07:35):
in the shoulder and I pulled the knife out and
I put it right into his throat and he didn't
walk out of that room. And Chris is the nicest
man that I've ever met. He has a huge heart.
And I think that there is a misunderstanding in our
society of what it takes to become part of the military.
How functional in some ways these soldiers are. They are
(07:58):
trained to enter into war, they are not trained to
re enter back into society. And so I have a friend, James,
who does very well as a building contractor, and he's
from the UK, and he asked me to be one
(08:19):
of the models. And I was very surprised and I said, well, James,
I'd love to have you work with me. I don't
understand why, but you want to be a model. That's good.
He's came and posed a few times and then I said,
I asked, hey, James, can you explain why you know
what why is this so important to you? Because he
(08:40):
was doing really well. He was bringing a lot of
juice to the photoshoots that we were doing, and I
was like a little puzzled, and he goes, well, okay,
i'll tell you after we finished work today. And so
he comes over. He goes, all right, So here's the story.
My great uncle and my great grandfather were both in
(09:00):
World War One. My great grandfather did not return. My
great uncle did return, and when he came home, he
proceeded to shoot his wife with his service revolver, shot
his daughter, and then he shot himself. And I grew
up in that home, and so it obviously had a
(09:21):
huge impact on him and the ghosts that lived in
his past. And that experience taught me what this war
and all wars are about. I really gave it my
all to show them, in everything that they have gone
(09:44):
through and all their humanity, in a way that is heroic,
that speaks well of them, because this is what they
deserve that. And the reason I'm harping on this is
because I don't think there is anything more noble than
to of one's all physically and mentally to one's country
and then come back and not be thanked. So the
(10:09):
biggest element that this sculpture does is show the transformation
of war historically in World War One, and it is
identifiable for any conflict that has happened since then.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery. And you've been listening to Saban
Howard who created the National World War One Memorial. It'll
be unveiled in Pershing Park and Washington, DC this September.
Go to Sabanhoward dot com to learn more, figure out
how you can support the great cause and great work
(10:44):
he's doing that will move you, and we'll move your
family
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