Of all the graffiti that humans have created over the centuries,
perhaps the most touching are the inscriptions left by soldiers. Long before the Achaeans set sail for Troy, military life was fraught with loneliness, inaction, anxiety, sudden intense drama and the very real prospect of premature violent death. Perhaps it's the intense sense of impermanence that marks the doodles, tunes and drawings that record troops entering and exiting the battlefield, or, as Mr. Roberts puts it in the play, "boring to boring, boring to boring" - This means far more than a handprint in the wet cement of a new sidewalk, a heart-shaped initial carved into an old tree, or a high school graduation message spray-painted on a highway overpass.
Military graffiti can range from fatalism to scarology to sarcastic comedy, from countless mournful variations on "why me" to the arrogance and bustle of young people heading into the unknown. During World War I, British soldiers, after reading the motto (God is with us) on the belt buckles of German soldiers, wrote on the walls of their trenches: "We have gloves too." Most of World War II One of the famous characters was a rugged, long-nosed fellow who peered over the fence and said, "Kilroy is here," and appeared almost everywhere American soldiers went. "In 2003, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History collected a number of examples of G.I. graffiti that caused a particular stir. These were captured by soldiers and Marines en route from Oakland, California, to Vietnam. The discovery of canvas paintings, writings and graffiti inscribed on the underside of a cramped hammock-like bunk on a soldier ship, documenting the experiences of those once young soldiers, was the unexpected result of another exploration. In March, Jack Fisk, the production designer of "The Thin Red Line," based on novelist James Jones's recollections of bats in the Pacific during World War II, wanted to make a set of films that accurately simulated the force's strength. Fisk consulted Art Beltrone, a Virginia-based collector of military memorabilia who had served as a film and museum consultant to him and Fisk for 30 years. decided that the best place to experience WWII troops was on a real ship: They headed to a marine reserve on Virginia's James River, where a ghostly fleet of mothballed troop carriers lay rusting on their anchors Waiting for demolition. At 4 a.m. on a cold winter morning, wearing miner helmets equipped with lights, they entered the General Nelson M. Walker, a 609-foot-long P-2 combat vehicle that was retired in 1968. Part of a massive fleet that ferried 500,000 soldiers and Marines to Vietnam
As Fisk photographed the troop barracks, Beltrone noticed canvas piled three high beneath the bunks. , tilted 45 degrees during the day, included drawings and texts written by soldiers on the bunks below. “There was a little bit of obscenity in everything,” Beltron recalled, drawings and even poetry “that he was mixed in with. The body is mesmerized—" Bang, "George Washington slept here," "Capitalist Yankee dog comes home!" "Beltron served in the Marine Corps Reserves in the 1960s but was not drafted during the Vietnam War." "I knew I had stumbled upon a unique personal history," he said when I spent time on Long Island. As those years passed, these young men were getting ready to go to war.
Beltron felt it was important to salvage some of the canvases, their message conveying bravado and suppressing fear about the immediate future. (He noted that the 18-day trip to the Pacific kept most soldiers happy because the transit time counted as "in-country" duties.) On the several occasions Beltron and his wife, photographer Lee, visited the ship, they These inscriptions were recorded on the canvas. (The full story is told in their book, Vietnam War Graffiti: A Forgotten Soldier's Message.
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