Silver Filigree Dog Tags by Lindsay Zike

Lindsay Zike, Collection of Service Dog Tags, Fine and Sterling Silver, 2015 (Private Collection). [Pin on Pinterest]

A simple piece of machine-pressed aluminum, nearly identical to millions of others. A practical solution to a grim problem; just before the turn of the last century it became apparent to the Quartermaster of Identification, Capt. Chaplain Charles C. Pierce, that the fighting in the Philippines had left the Army with too many unidentified fallen. His solution was to outfit each solider with an identity disk made of cheap pressed aluminum. A few years before the US entered the Great War the Army adopted this policy, and with a few minor design changes the modern dog tag came into existence.

Over the years the dog tag has become an icon of the military. In the movies the visual symbolism to indicate that a character was, at any time, associated with the service is the ever-present dog tags around their necks. Personally, a decade after my service ended, I still carry mine with me every day. So associated with the military, the dog tags have also became a symbol of bad-ass-ness; every wannabe, from Justin Bieber to the armchair commandos that answer the call of duty with a controller in their hands have a far nicer set than those in my pocket.



There is a moment among many moments, while standing in a line in a series of lines, somewhere between MEPS and the end of Basic, where each new recruit is issued their own dog tags. It is a right of passage of sorts, an indication that one has been accepted. It is also means other things; the value of your personal identity has been reduced to a small trinket milled out of the cheapest possible metal, identical to the set jingling around each and every one of your new brothers' and sisters' necks. Their identity has also been permanently embossed upon this small, mass-produced icon.

Like all icons, the meaning of the dog tag is different to each collective. Both the internal and external meaning includes a mindset. For those outside, it represents John Wayne's longest day and Clint Eastwood's stroll up Heartbreak Ridge; it is an icon of an idealized masculinity. For those that wore them it is a momento mori, a constant reminder that you don't want to live forever but you don't want to be forgotten either.

This set of fine and sterling silver filigree dog tags, as lightweight as the icon they are patterned on, are the exact opposite of thin, cheaply made tags issued by the government. While the identical blank GI tags are churned out more than 300,000 per year, each of these are painstakingly hand-crafted one at a time in a process that can never be exactly repeated—no two could ever be precisely the same. GI tags are identical in every way until a service member's identity is reduced to five lines of information. The very structure of these silver tags relies upon the support of letters they bear, “ARMY,” “USMC,” “USN,” “USAF,” or “USCG.” The delicate tension between the lines of the letters, the external frame, and the swirling loops of filigree wire betrays the complex relationship the veteran has with the service. (Share on Twitter) Without those letters the external frame would be too weak and fragile to hold its shape, and the beautiful coils that fill in the gaps would have no anchors to hold them in place. Without the frame and the filigree, the letters are mere forms of twisted metal. The strength of these tags is in the combination of the delicate and the hard, the lines and the curves.

The first set of issued dog tags, meant only to preserve the names of the dead, stamped out of inexpensive materials by machines in a production line, reduces the identity of the service member down to only what is necessary. These silver filigree dog tags, individually created by the hands of a veteran, are a celebration of our collective identity.

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