Exhaustion, hunger and homesickness are etched in their faces. The men and women in military uniform from generations of war line the walls of D.H. Hill Library in 116 pictures, hanging in juxtaposition with students sipping on coffee and studying.

Photographs in “The American Soldier: A photographic tribute the Civil War to Iraq” capture the military stint past generations and current soldiers have experienced. The exhibit will remain at N.C. State until Jan. 11.

“This exhibition includes photographs from the bloody Civil War clashes in the nation’s heartland to the fighting in the streets of Baghdad,” Cyma Rubin, the producer and creator of the exhibit said in an official statement to the University. “It’s the GIs, the Army, the Marines. Those who march the dusty trails, climb the icy ridges, dig the muddied trenches, carve the paths in the jungle, endure the blinding sandstorms and the treacherous heat and diseases.”

Nine wars are represented in the exhibit, including the Civil War and foreign soil wars such as World War I and II, the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, according to Kevin Schlesier, exhibits and outreach librarian.

Schlesier said he felt the exhibit is important to the NCSU community because of the strong military presence in N.C. and the unique messages of war the photographs convey.

“[The photographs] show what’s going on in between the battle,” Schlesier said. “It’s all not all about the battles.”

Schlesier noted a picture of a soldier saying good-bye to his sweetheart.

“Saying good-bye doesn’t get easier,” Schlesier said. He said he felt the pictures of the past are still relevant to today’s military.

“[The exhibit] shows what every soldier has to deal with daily,” Schlesier said. “You can see it in their faces.”

Rubin said she was “gathering, gathering, gathering” about 4,000 to 5,000 pictures from news agencies, historical societies, museums, private collectors, university libraries and the Library of Congress to complete the exhibit.

A young soldier sitting on a pile of blankets after his first night of combat in the Battle of the Bulge is one of the pictures in the exhibit and inspired her research, according to Rubin.

“When I saw it, it hit a strong note,” Rubin said. “It was just so real, so human as to what the foot soldier is all about.”

She said it appeared on a May 1995 cover of New York Times Magazine. She left it in her “one of these days” pile until three years ago, when she started the project.

“I felt this is most important at the given time since we’re at war,” Rubin said. “The story needed to be told. There are too many times [the soldier’s] story hasn’t been told.”

She said she wants viewers to “step back and take a hard look at what we’re doing” by asking our young men and women to sacrifice their lives for a war.

“Looking at young people from the Civil War, you can put those faces on the ones in Iraq today,” Rubin said. “They are the same faces.”

The act of sending young people to war is one of the issues Rubin said she hopes the exhibit makes people aware of.

“It opens [the viewer’s] eyes to where we are and where we’ve been by sending young people to battle,” she said. “Is it worth the lives and injuries?”

Rubin said she hopes viewers will see the soldier as a person in situations most people could never imagine.

“I concentrated on the humanity, camaraderie, courage and the ultimate sacrifice of the American soldier,” Rubin said.

She said she felt the exhibit shows the human side of the soldier and takes the viewer “as close to the soldier as the soldiers find themselves there.” She said the photography is different from the “moving image” on television and the Internet.

“The moment has been captured by the photographer stays there forever,” Rubin said.

Some students who saw the exhibit said they think other students do not receive the message Rubin intended.

Josh Johner, junior in aerospace engineering, said he felt students are apathetic to the current war and the exhibit.

“I think the main reaction from people walking by is ‘that’s cool’ and keep walking by,” Johner said. He said he felt students do not care because war does not directly affect their lives.

“We don’t think about what’s going on,” Johner said.

Johner said he is in the National Guard and completed his basic training as an infantry soldier this summer. He said he enjoyed the exhibit.

“They showed soldiers laying in the snow-dead,” Johner said. “The pictures gave you a decent appreciation of the danger [the soldiers] faced.”

Johner said he felt students need to take time to view the exhibit to learn soldiers’ commitments to their country and to a uniform cause. He said he felt most students do not realize the whole picture of a young person’s commitment to service.

“As you see the pictures of the Confederacy lying dead, that’s a 19-year-old boy,” Johner said. “That’s the same person sitting next to you in math class.”

Other students said they felt other students could use the dose of reality from viewing the exhibit.

“The military went to the war. America went to the mall,” Matthew Black, junior in civil engineering and an infantryman in the National Guard, said.

He said the large size of the pictures in the exhibit allow the detail of emotion to be displayed leading to a better connection to the soldiers’ experiences.

Pat Thomas, a nurse at a military hospital in Fayetteville and mother of Aaron Thomas, a freshman in computer engineering, said the human side of the people in the pictures is compelling. She said she wanted to learn about the story behind each picture.

Pat said working with military every day, she sees the hardships service members endure as part of their duty.

“It’s not just the soldier. It’s the whole family fighting the war,” she said.

One of the pictures of a sergeant meeting her infant nephew for the first time after returning home from a deployment shows the sacrifices of family, according to Pat.

“You think about the personal connection,” Pat said. “They’re real people.”