Monument

“It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.” E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime


This past week, the powers that be on Camp Ramadi destroyed my favorite landmark. One day it was there, and the next large earth-movers were swarming over it bulldozing it apart and trucking it off. I was upset not so much that it was going away, but that I had not taken the time to properly document it. It was situated alongside a prominent footpath from the dining facility to our unit headquarters compound, and so was a source of daily joy to me for many months of the deployment. Its existence was at once improbable yet perfectly explainable, fantastic yet almost vulgar; it carried a depth of irony that was fresh and enjoyable: maintaining a lofty artistic stature in a low-brow location, and its general trashy untidiness held a rebellious, cocksure stance amid the dull efficiencies and proprieties of a military garrison. Nothing that cool, interesting, or ugly could long exist in proximity to a military compound.

The monument was a large dune of sand, rocks, trash, and dust--nearly six feet, with an enormous ball of barbed wire, concrete chunks, Hesco bastion remnants, torn sand bags, and all other manner of construction waste, junk, and detritus perched almost delicately atop it, towering fully over fourteen feet in height. Mangled metal rebar frizzled out of it like the extravagant blown-glass tentacles of Dale Chihuly; snagged plastic bags rattled in the wind like tawdry Tibetan prayer flags; a few tumbleweeds clung like briars: it was a masterpiece of aleatoric sculpture. A bastard hybrid of highbrow earthworks art and the rapid expediency of a constantly changing combat environment. I noticed a number of platoons taking their group photos in front of it before leaving, so I think it did elicit some popular appeal; it certainly was unavoidable, definitely not obscure. As time dragged on, my thoughts on the sculpture moved from a novelty interest to believe that it could symbolize the operation of Camp Ramadi as whole, and the impersonal nature of institutional change and form. It was a testament to the vagaries of military command policy just as an icicle sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy or sand drawing by Jim Denevan bears witness to the transient whims of Nature.


It goes something like this: a new unit rolls in, hard-charging: they conduct the battle hand-over and by golly they've got to change things. That previous unit got complacent in their last months, and we're going to improve their lazy position--we're not like them! Changing mission requirements, troop surges, reductions, and movements; expanding housing, remodeling facilities, destroying housing, changing units, and so on: the landmark became a repository of all the castaway jetsam of a myriad of plans and lack thereof, calculated "position improvements" and camp restructurings, and so on. At face value the chance sculpture was a pile of trash expediently, randomly formed into an interesting shape, but to me it was a monument to all the myriad rearrangings of Camp Ramadi and the fickle decisions that govern it. I suppose all of this is merely the normal progression of things, and perhaps specious to connect natural change to a perceived hubris in command, but the fact remains that someone finally deemed it necessary to allocate resources to rid the camp of the impertinent eyesore, when it didn't really seem to impede the "progress" or "development" of the camp. My new favorite landmark is not quite so compelling, but a bit more stark: it is the pristine concrete sidewalk constructed at great expense two months ago in front of the Post Exchange; two weeks ago it was barricaded by chain-link fencing in a rash of force protection upgrades.