Bradford Edwards is an American artist who spent several years in the Nineties scouring Vietnam markets for authentic Vietnam War era Zippo lighters owned by American Soldiers. In the course of his travels he amassed a collection of 282 of the lighters, which over the course of the war took on a talismanic quality for the soldiers who owned them.

The messages on the lighters range from the poignant to the political, with love notes sitting beside kill counts. Their unifying thread is the unabashedly American medium, the Zippo lighter. It’s an amazing collection that gives an insight into the collective conscious of a nation in turmoil.