Art in the Desert

Everything is the same here.  Uniformly flat.  Monochromatic.  All the buildings look exactly the same and are painted the exact same color.  The weather is exactly the same every single day.  Everybody dresses the same.  Walks the same.  Talks the same.  I get up in the morning at exactly the same time, 4 am.  I put on PT gear.  I walk to the gym.  I lift weights according to a set routine.  I eat breakfast at the chow hall: three eggs, over medium, with two sausage patties and some bacon, a toasted english muffin with strawberry cream cheese, a bowl of cereal (Total raisin bran or Kashi), two 8 oz bottles of whole milk and an apple juice box.

I put my tray away, I go to my room, change into my uniform: Airman Battle Uniform, desert boots, boonie hat, sunglasses.  I go to work.  I do the same shit.  12 to 14 hour shift.  Come back.  Eat.  Shower.  Turn on my laptop and hope someone back home is online for me to talk to.  Watch a few episodes of Freaks and Geeks.  I fall asleep by 9 or 10 pm.

Rinse and repeat.

There are spots on the base that aren't uniformly bland.  People tend to mark public spaces.  They put squadron stickers from back home on tables, chairs, and rocks.  By claiming the space and making it their own, maybe they are trying to assert their existence in a throng of people who dress, walk, talk, and look exactly the same in a rigidly structured grid of identical concrete structures whose only distinguishable features are the small brown signs by the doors marking the number of the buildings.

Maybe it's because of the fact that in deployed environments, people are inherently transient.  Air Force deployments usually last from six months to up to a year.  And although when you're here, it sounds like a very long time, in the grand scheme of things, it's really not.  The bootprints that you made will eventually be covered over by the marks of other people that come after you.  And as time goes by, this experience will become nothing more than a memory; a six month fantasy land in a place you will never see again.

So it's understandable why people would want to leave their mark on the base.  All the stickers and the murals and the signs are basically more evolved forms of the "Keoni wuz hea!" scrawlings that you see in public bathroom stalls and on desks in public schools.

Ferocious!

Surrounding much of the base, especially the dormitory areas at the Coalition Compound, are concrete barricades spaced a few feet apart from each other, presumably to prevent drivers (either US/Coalition or "hajji terrorists") from ramming into living areas.  The barricades are usually only a few feet tall but some of them are pretty high and different units that were deployed here have appropriated the barricades and left their marks on them.  Some of them range from looking like third grade finger paintings to works of art.

I'm assuming those tick marks on the bottom denote how many things they blew up or planes they shot down.  That's usually how it goes.  By the way, the American flag, to no one's surprise, is a common theme in most of the paintings.

The Grim Reaper is another common character in several of the murals.  This mural is for the ammo guys. I'm not exactly sure what unit they're in.  Something to think about is that, back at home, whenever I'm working at Hickam in the Air National Guard, when I see the F-22s take off, the pilots are pretty much just patrolling or training.  Over here, when a B-1B takes off, it's not going on a training run and it's not patrolling.  When it takes off, it's going out there to break things and hurt people.  Everything on this base is geared towards supporting that mission, from finance and military pay people, to the comm guys (me), to the ammo guys who actually load the bombs that get dropped on people in places not very far from here.

I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.

More Grim Reaper stuff.  This is from Security Forces.  You can tell by the "SF" armband on the figure in the painting. 

I thought this one was interesting.  And I can totally see some cultural studies people in the English department going apeshit over this.

I wanted to take the time to compose these pictures better, but I suck at photography, and I was taking these pictures standing in the middle of the road, and I didn't want to get flattened by a passing truck or an Army humvee.