Flashback 4

Standing post is a ubiquitous duty for all Marines all over the world. As you read this, I guarantee you there are literally thousands of young men and women bored out of their sun-bleached minds staring at a foreign horizon of some godforsaken piece of beige nothingness, just praying for something to actually happen, to make the shift pass a little more quickly.

Alpha Company of 1/7 made up the Marine Corps presence at Al-Taqaddam Air Base (ATQ). They served as the FOB Security Force providing guard post duty and perimeter patrols, as well as facilitating the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) for the Special Operations Task Force (SOTF) on base. On the daily rotation for many of the corporals and lance corporals was a spell on guard post, on one of the multiple towers protecting Camp Manion.

Camp Manion is a base within the much larger, Iraqi-controlled, Al-Taqaddam Air Base. Camp Manion's footprint takes up a small corner of the base here, providing working space and housing for the Marines of the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force – Crisis Response – Central Command (SP-MAGTF-CR-CC).

Camp Manion is named after 1st Lt. Travis Manion, who posthumously earned a silver star for helping wounded Marines during a sniper attack on a combined Iraqi and US patrol in nearby Fallujah in 2007. It was his second tour in Iraq.

For the Marines on guard duty around Camp Manion today was going to be their lucky day. The circus was coming to town. The clowns arrived sometime around 8.00 am. Nobody had given the two Marines on post the heads-up. They had no idea we were coming which is just the way we like it. No opportunity to tidy up, or square things away. No spit and polish. No uniform laundering. The scene was just as it would be any other day, in any other lookout post, on any other base, anywhere in an active combat zone. Scruffy, dirty, worn out, well-oiled and murderously functional. This particular scene is in Post 4.

I am part of a group of four field artists here in Iraq representing the National Museum of the Marine Corps (NMMC) in Quantico, Virginia. We are two civilians and two active duty Marines (two teams with one of each). Two youngies and two oldies. The civilians being the oldies. Artist team One is made up of the experienced, esteemed, and gentlemanly illustrator Victor Juhasz, and SSgt. Elize McKelvey a reprographics Marine at the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia. In team Two, I am playing the role of the curmudgeonly Scottish/Canadian artist, accompanying Captain CJ Baumann, a Marine logistics officer at The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia.

We are all, like it or not, walking in the footsteps of real combat artists. We try to follow the unwritten rules they followed. We go out to where the men and women are young, and were the danger is real. We experience and we make art of that experience. We all work hard to draw on scene, no matter how challenging or incongruous that may be. We take pencils out while all around us others are checking their weapons. Could be a little overly dramatic there. We make a lot of poor renderings in rubbish drawing conditions, but when the stress is high, and the sweat runs down onto the paper, the quality becomes less important, and the emotion starts to show through. We draw what we see. Good or bad. We don’t stage, and although without weapons, we have a hair trigger to shoot down anything that might vaguely smell of propaganda.

A Corporal and a Lance Corporal were on duty when Cpt Baumann and I scrambled up the stairs. They accepted our presence with casual aplomb … but radioed in our appearance just the same. Just in case this is all a test. “Trust but verify,” as the Gipper would have said, after he borrowed the phrase from the Russians. We get ‘verified” by the command post and we are good to go. LCpl. Molinar is from New Mexico, he immediately goes back to what he was doing before we arrived. Staring at the horizon, chewing tobacco, and likely cursing the recruiter who got him into this. The LCpl. Looks like he won’t be shifting too much so I settle back against some sandbags and get to work. Cpt. Baumann does the same from a different angle. I just happen to have sat with my back to a desperately hopeful AC unit. It blows hairdryer hot air down the back of my neck as I draw.

You can tell that these guard towers have been here a while. They have been built, and improved, and strengthened and fortified multiple times in the last ten years. They are a Red-Green Show amalgam of lumber, sand, and steel polished smooth by the hands and feet of fidgeting guards during thousands upon thousands of hours of standing and staring. The sand outside is littered with discarded plastic water bottles forever locked in no-man’s land between the various fences, the razor wire, and the Hesco base walls. There is enough assorted weaponry to destroy a small village, handily arrayed and accurately focused in interlocking fields of death for anyone stupid enough to try something.

“There is a guy walking over there.” This from Cpl. Skladany, (‘Dany’ to his fellow Marines), a huge, broad New Yorker staring in the opposite direction. “You almost never see anyone walking out there,” he says. “Where would you be going?” It is over 110 degrees in the shade, and the nearest town is Al Habbaniyah which is in the opposite direction. I have to use binoculars in order to see the man. These old eyes.

Spending time with Marines like this is the solid gold of getting at the reality of Marine Corps life. They are out of earshot of sergeants and officers, and with some quick self-deprecating banter, they will quickly be themselves. That is to say they will shoot the breeze, wax-eloquent, and generally take the piss, on any topic under the sun. It all helps push the hours in front of them neatly behind them. It makes the time pass. Captain Baumann and I supply the topics, and a little distraction, and the conversation flows as we draw, and they stand watch.

After a couple of hours of this we take a break and hike to the next post in line. It is only a couple of hundred yards away, but by the time we get there I am really feeling the heat chafe. We spend much of the day like this, moving from post to post. Collecting the names and home towns of corporals and lance corporals from California, Idaho, Rhode Island, Hawaii, and in one case New Zealand. They all seem so young to me now. We chat. We tell them of our mission. They display the usual skepticism. Then they see the drawings, and they get it. Rinse and repeat.

As I draw these scenes the international nature of them occurs to me. I can take myself back in my minds-eye through guard towers I have known and loved, all over the world. A Togoan peacekeeper, Kalashnikov slung over his back, drawn on damp paper, as a wall of rain poured in the Central African Republic in 2009. The Afghan national Army soldier, who even while I was drawing kept leaving his post to come and stand behind me to watch me draw him, in 2010. Pakistani peacekeepers, who eyed me with suspicion as a spy, the whole time I drew in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008. An impossibly young female reservist Marine sitting behind a Mark 19 grenade launcher in the middle of Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2003. The nervous Canuck light-infantryman looking down over the evening-green sweep of grape fields in the Arghandab Valley in, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan in 2007, just waiting for the first rocket of the night. The two US army soldiers on a lone hilltop outpost overlooking FOB Mizan in Zabul Province, Afghanistan in 2014, tracking all movement below, while singing Tom Jones.

There is something here that I can’t quite put my finger on. Something to do with their youth, and the weight of their responsibility, that I can’t quite grasp while I am drawing then in the moment. There is a fragility to their situation. And a seriousness. On any given day they are usually just a tiny piece in a very big USMC machine, but on guard duty they are something else. On post these very young men and women hold in their hands, the responsibility for the safety of those inside the base.

The epiphany eventually arrives later that evening. As much as we distracted, as much as we chatted, as much as we laughed, and helped pass the time - the Marines never took their eyes off the horizon. On post, they are the front line.