Futile Memorials

Sidebar Text

For fifteen years, I have had extreme, possibly unprecedented, access to one of the largest military bases ever closed in the United States: Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro. Through persistence, luck, and guile, I came to possess master keys to all 1,800 structures.

El Toro is utterly entangled with sixty years of U.S. military history. It’s a haunted place. The huge southern California base was the headquarters for U.S. Marine Corps air operations, western United States and Pacific region. It was central to WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. Then it was shuttered in the base closures of the mid-1990s.

In the end, of course, all photographs engage deeply with time, and hence mortality. “All photographs are memento mori,” wrote Susan Sontag. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” Thousands of hours at El Toro have made me a mortality tourist. It’s a place deeply implicated in war and death, that is, itself, destined for destruction. At El Toro, I’ve tried to let the images wander ghostlike into the present laden with impossible loads of history.

Photo Description

In the summer of 1965 the United States began moving the 450 helicopters of the 1st Cavalry into the highlands of Vietnam. Brigadier General John Wright used a ceremonial machete to slash the first swath of high grass on what would become the 275-acre An Khe Air Field and the helicopter gunships began firing on villages from Qui Nhon to Pleiku. On August 31, the helicopters dropped C Company into an unnamed hamlet near Vinh Thanh. A left-handed paratrooper rolled a fragmentation grenade into the dirt shelter carved beneath a thatched home. The villagers later lifted a pregnant young woman in a long-sleeved cotton shirt from the shelter. Her black hair was tied behind her head. She was spotted with drying blood. They carried her out and quietly laid her body in the center of the path through the village.

I picked three plumes from the clumps of grass at the runway edge. I used a stray strand to tie the feathery wisps together. I laid the grass in the center of the jetway and sat there in silence. A slight wind rocked the grass back and forth.

October 5, 1942. Postman Hermann Graebe, witness. "The people who got off the trucks—men, women and children of all ages—had to undress upon the orders of an SS man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and underclothing. I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of underlinen and clothing. Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near I heard no complaint or plea for mercy. I watched a family of about eight persons, a man and a woman, both about fifty, with their children aged about one, eight and ten, and two grown-up daughters of about twenty to twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight."

Along the closed rail spur in the shadow of the main warehouses I found a bone: tiny, smaller than my little finger, bleached white, as light as a feather. There had been just enough rain to puddle against the rusted rim of the rail dock. I placed the bone on the platform edge.

The killers used machetes at the church on the rocky hill. Nobody knows how many people they killed at the church at Nyarabuye, province of Kibungo, close by the Tanzanian border in eastern Rwanda in April of 1994. Some say fifteen hundred or two thousand. Some say many more. It is clear that one particular man crawled toward the confession booth. When they hacked off his hands, exposed bones emerged from his cuffs like bloody branches. When they hacked off his feet, they left him before the altar to bleed and die. After killing all day, the killers sliced the Achilles tendons of the survivors and went off to rest and relax. The killers camped on the hillside behind the church, roasting whole stolen cows and drinking banana beer. After a night’s sleep, they continued the killing.

I sifted through a drift of shattered glass near a pile of forty-two uprooted steel fence posts. I wanted to find the fragments of glass from the center point, the spot where the blow had shattered the pane. By day’s end, with the sun descending into cold clouds and mist, I had only found nine pieces from the center. I assembled them atop a seven-foot cube of solid concrete—a barrier, perhaps, or a counterweight.

The crusaders left conquered Antioch on November 23, 1098 on a five day march to Ma'arrat. "The march begins," wrote an eyewitness. "Soon all is tumult. The incendiaries set the villages on fire followed by foragers who sack them. The terrified inhabitants are either burned or led away with their hands tied behind their backs to be held for ransom. Wherever you look you can see helmets glinting in the sun, pennons waving in the breeze, the whole plain covered in horsemen... The smoke billows, flames crackle." The Crusaders surrounded Ma'arrat with towers and siege engines. Gulpher of Lastours was the first to breach the walls. Once inside, in the bright morning light of December 11, 1098, the Crusaders "killed everyone, man or woman, whom they met in any place whatsoever." At nightfall, wishing to rest after the exertions of continuous slaughter, the Christian leaders made an offer to their Muslim counterparts: Gather with your possessions and we will assure your safety. The Muslim leaders collected their families in the town's palace. The next morning the Christians set upon them and butchered them until the marble floors flowed with blood.

I poured one liter of purified water onto the dust-covered floor of an upper room. I lay prone in the dirt with my camera and watched the water slowly flow. When I stood and gathered my things, I disturbed a pair of white owls who flew off through the tangles of trusses and razor wire.

When Napoleon entered Moscow unopposed on September 14, 1812, the retreating Russians torched the city. Fires were first set in the congested Kitaigorod markets. The flames spread swiftly into a consuming conflagration. Claude François de Méneval was an eyewitness: "The town was one mighty furnace from which sheaves of fire burst heavenwards lighting up the horizon with glaring flames and spreading a burning heat. These masses of flame, mingling together, were rapidly caught up by a strong wind which spread them in every direction. They were accompanied by a succession of whistling noises and explosions caused by falling walls and the explosion of inflammable materials which were stored in the shops and houses. To these roaring noises, to these sinister outbreaks added themselves the cries and yells of the wretched people who were caught by the flames in the houses which they had entered to pillage and which many escaped only to perish in the streets which formed a blazing labyrinth from which all escape was impossible."

I made a house from wooden matches. As darkness closed, I cradled the tiny house in my hands and carried it to the farthest end of the runway. The evening was cold and the wind had an edge. When the flames caught, the small house burned to crumbled ash within a minute or two.

For years, political suspects interrogated by the Port Elizabeth security police reported that a senior officer would question them with a pickled black man's hand in a jar sitting on the desk. On June 25, 1985, Matthew Goniwe, a high school teacher and anti-apartheid activist, was the subject of discussion at a meeting of the South African State Security Council. The security forces described Goniwe as "at the forefront of a revolutionary attack against the state." Secret minutes of the meeting show that the security forces recommended his "removal." F. W. de Klerk, South Africa's last white president was at the meeting, and records show he supported the decision to remove Goniwe. According to the secret minutes, the precise Afrikaans word used was verwyder. It translates as "get rid of, put out of the way, dispose of, eliminate." Two days later, security branch policeman Jaap van Jaarsveld, visited Goniwe's hometown. The security police stopped Goniwe at roadblock on a deserted street, strangled him with telephone wire, then stabbed and shot him. To impede identification they used torches to burn away Matthew Goniwe's face and hacked off his hands.

I didn't have it planned, but it was perfect. At the Museum of Contemporary Art the day before, I had watched the 34 second video "Fall 1"—Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader falling from a Los Angeles roof in 1970. And then, of course, I had Matthew Goniwe's story running in my head. So, I was not too surprised when a steep slope of broken runway concrete shifted and a chunk crushed my left hand. I got out my camera and made an image.

The first bullet went in the neck of Mau Manu and out his forehead. So said his son who watched. With that, the Indonesian military incursion into the East Timorese village of Darulete began in earnest. The next victim was Lakucai, an elderly man, blind in one eye, who worked as a cook and dish washer for the clerk at the local court. A little after 8:00 a.m., the soldiers beheaded Lakucai. They carried his head down the street and put it on a stake in front of Alfonso de Santos' house. After they left that day, August 11, 1975, Lakucai's wife of nearly 50 years, Adelina Freitas, collected his head. She carefully wrapped it in a tais, a traditional, Ikat-dyed, hand-woven Timorese cloth. Adelina reunited her husband's head and body and buried him in a red earth grave beside their house in Darulete.

I bought the most delicate palm tree seedling I could find: chamaedorea seifrizii, a tropical variety, light shade, plenty of water, $1.19. Giant machines had been shattering the two-foot-thick main section of runway 16 Left. I planted the tiny palm in a furrow of fragmented concrete and walked away in the shimmering heat.

"My brother was kidnapped on the 9th of November, 1976. He was asleep with his wife and his five years old son when they were wakened at about 2:00 a.m. by a loud explosion. My brother got out of bed, opened the front door, and saw four people jumping over the fence. They were in civilian clothes; one of them had a moustache and a jersey wrapped round his head like a turban; they all carried rifles. Three of them burst into the flat and ordered my sister-in-law and the boy not to look. The neighbors say that two of them dragged out my brother and forced him into a Ford Falcon. That's the last we heard of him. They also say there were several cars and a truck on the scene, and there were a lot of men with rifles behind the trees. The traffic had been halted, and a helicopter was circling over the house." Ramon Perez was never seen again. Every Wednesday, an unmarked military truck carrying 15 to 20 groggy, sedated prisoners departed the detention center at the Naval Mechanics School and drove to the Buenos Aires airport. A military aircraft climbed to 13,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. "They were unconscious," said former Argentine navy Captain Adolfo Francisco Scilingo. "We stripped them, and when the flight commander gave the order, we opened the door and threw them out, naked, one by one. That is the story, and nobody can deny it." The Wednesday flights went on for years during the 1970s.

Machines had been tearing at the outside walls. The pump room was barely passable. Just outside, a chunk of concrete the size of a child was suspended by a tangle of rebar. I reached though the door, put my right palm against a crushed edge, and pushed firmly. The concrete swung for a brief moment, then was still. When I returned twelve days later, the entire building was gone.

A raw north wind drove dense falling snow across the 180 Cheyenne lodges during the night. Though he stayed up late that night—November 26, 1868—Black Kettle awoke the next morning before dawn. He stepped outside. A heavy fog hung in the valley of the Washita and he could see deep, drifted snow on the ridges across the river. A bugle blared out of the fog, then the shouts of charging soldiers. His wife came running with his horse. The deep snow muffled the hoofbeats. Black Kettle heard only the jingle of harness metal, the screams of a Cheyenne woman, and bugles everywhere. Custer brought his military band through the snow and ordered them to play Garry Owen for the charge. Black Kettle reached for his wife's hand and pulled her up on the horse behind him. They were almost to the ford of the Washita when cavalrymen in heavy blue coats and fur hats came out of the fog. A bullet ripped into his stomach. The horse swerved. Another bullet caught him in the back and spun him into the snow at the river's edge. Bullets tore his wife from the horse and into the water. The cavalrymen charged across the ford and over the bodies of Black Kettle and his wife.

The pine tree had been mutilated. The jutting trunk testified it had taken extreme force. The debris was long since cleared away, leaving just a few fragments. I picked up a broken twig as big around as a pencil. Held at just the right angle, it seemed to restore the tree.

At 8:14 a.m. August 6, 1945, Akihiro Takhashi, 14, was in the school yard waiting for the morning meeting at Hiroshima Municipal Junior High School. He looked up at a single silver aircraft very high in the sky. A teacher called for attention. As Akihiro turned his face away from the plane a pinkish white glare spread across the sky. The school exploded into noise, heat, debris, and darkness. Akihiro found that his clothes had been vaporized. Skin hung in soggy sheets from his back, arms, and legs. He began walking west toward home. Grass burned on the ground like dry straw. "I saw a man whose skin was completely stripped away from the upper half of his body, and a woman whose eyeballs were sticking out. Her whole baby was bleeding. A mother and baby were lying with skin completely peeled off." Superheated air from the explosion rose to a great height. Poisonous rain fell lightly from a clear sky. Akihiro reached the river and plunged his burning body three times into the cold water.

I selected one of the few poems I know by heart. I hand wrote a copy and set it on the steeply inclined jet blast dissipater in Building #697. It only took a single match. I learned the poem when we studied Robert Frost in high school literature class. It's been with me since, fixed in place by the grim rhythm and dark descending cadence.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

"The Spaniards with their Horses, their Speares and Lances, began to commit murders and strange cruelties: they entred into Townes, Borowes, and Villages, sparing neither children nor old men, neither women with childe, neither them that lay in, but that they ripped their bellies, and cut them in peeces, as if they had beene opening of Lambes shut up in their fold. They laid wagers with such as with one thrust of a sword would paunch or bowell a man in the middest, or with one blow of a sword would most readily and most deliverly cut off his head, or that would best pierce his entrals at one stroake. They tooke the little soules by the heeles, ramping them from the mothers dugges, and crushed their heads against the clifts."
—The account of Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican missionary who took part in the conquest of Cuba in 1513.

The deepest room of jet engine test building is carpeted with tiny bones. For years, raptors have killed small animals and dropped their remains down the four-story concrete chimney. In the near darkness, I selected one tiny, perfect skull. I placed it on the high concrete wall along the north wide of the test building and waited for sunset.

"Please Uncle, do take me to Kharkiv. We have neither bread nor anything else to eat. Father is completely exhausted from hunger and is lying on the bench, unable to get to his feet. Mother is blind from the hunger. She cannot see at all, so I have to guide her when she has to go outside." Zina Riabokin, a young girl in the Ukraine, was swept into the 1932-33 genocidal famine that Josef Stalin used as a weapon against his opposition. Together with five to eight million other Ukrainians, Zina was killed by the program of calculated starvation. "Please Uncle, take me to Kharkiv, because I, too, will die from hunger. Please do take me, please. I'm still young and I want so much to live a while. Here I will surely die, for everyone else is dying."

I crouched amid crushed stone and metal and focused on the upended steel storage tank. I selected one unsullied white stone. I tossed it into the air and tried to catch it centered on the tank.

 

"The minute the gates opened up, we heard screams, the barking of dogs… And then we got out of the train. And everything went so fast: left, right, right, left. Men separated from women. Children torn from the arms of their mothers. The elderly chased like cattle. The sick and the disabled handled like packs of garbage. They were thrown over the side with broken suitcases, with boxes. My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me, 'Liebele, I'm not going to see you any more. Take care of your brother.'"
—Leo Schneiderman, on his arrival at Auschwitz

Somebody dug a deep pit at the base of the ladder. I guessed it was part of the remediation, the attempts to heal the earth. A common vulture, Cathartes aura, circled above. I saw the telltale wings—silver-grey with a diagonal knife slash of black. I stood in the pit looked up and waited for the vulture to drift by in its silent soaring flight.

Isaiah 36:1-2: "Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of the King of Hezekiah, that Sennacherib, King of Assyria, came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them." In 701 B.C., the Assyrian army took Lachish. Sennacherib commemorated what followed in translucent alabaster panels in his capital of Nineveh. "I felled 50 of their fighting men, burned 200 captives, and defeated in a battle on the plain 332 troops. With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool and the rest of them the ravines and torrents of the mountain swallowed. I cut off then heads of their fighters and built a tower before their city. I burned their adolescent boys and girls alive." One particularly gorgeous alabaster relief shows prisoners being skinned alive, the victims pulled taut by helmeted figures, in stone, forever. "I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile of corpses. I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the walls."

I unfurled a short length of white string and briefly stood in the light drizzle. I set a shattered piece of concrete on one end of the strand. I sighted through my camera and walked backward until the string pulled taut.

 

At 8:14 a.m. August 6, 1945, Akihiro Takhashi, 14, was in the school yard waiting for the morning meeting at Hiroshima Municipal Junior High School. He looked up at a single silver aircraft very high in the sky. A teacher called for attention. As Akihiro turned his face away from the plane a pinkish white glare spread across the sky. The school exploded into noise, heat, debris, and darkness. Akihiro found that his clothes had been vaporized. Skin hung in sheets from his back, arms, legs. He began walking west toward home. Grass burned on the ground like dry straw. "I saw a man whose skin was completely stripped away from the upper half of his body, and a woman whose eyeballs were sticking out. Her whole baby was bleeding. A mother and baby were lying with skin completely peeled off." Superheated air from the explosion rose to a great height causing a poisonous rain to fall lightly from the clear sky. Akihiro reached the river and plunged his burning body three times into the cold water.

In a darkened labyrinth of military offices, there was a particular door with its key still in place. I had seen it months ago. I returned and wandered two floors of silent hallways, abandoned rooms, and door after empty door. When I finally found the door with the key, I knelt in the finely sifted dust, touched the key once, and framed a photograph toward the light.

 

"It would be impossible to describe in words strong enough the details of the carnage that took place during the first attack, which lasted a good hour or more," wrote M. de la Colonie. The English opened with raking gunfire and, armed with information provided by a betraying French officer, charged the hilltop entrenchments above the Danube on July 2, 1704. "We were all fighting hand to hand, hurling them back as they clutched at the parapet; men were slaying, or tearing at the muzzles of the guns and the bayonets which pierced their entrails; crushing under their feet their own wounded comrades, and even gouging out their opponents' eyes with their own nails, when the grip was so close that neither could make use of their weapons." One hour into the Battle of Schellenberg-one battle of hundreds in the War of the Spanish Succession-the parapet was heaped to the crest with dead and dying. De la Colonie's crisp military coat dripped with brains and blood.

I climbed the darkened stairs and set up my tripod in the last moments of light. I had no time. I framed by reflex and uncapped the red paint. I picked the spot by instinct and applied my hand with no deliberation. Within a few quick exposures, the light was gone. I stood in the darkening room. A smear of red stained my camera.

 

Hitler long planned to begin killing "life unworthy of life." In 1935, he told Reich physician leader Gerhard Wagner the killing would begin once he launched the war. The Kanuer baby, sex unknown, was born in late 1938. A leg and part of an arm were missing and the infant was thought to be blind. The Knauer family took the child to the Leipzig University Children's Hospital and sought Adolf Hitler's official permission to have the baby killed. Hitler prepared a letter on his personal stationery expanding the power of the state so that "patients who, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death, after a discerning diagnosis." The letter is dated September 1, 1939, the day German troops moved into Poland. Hitler dispatched his personal escorting physician Karl Brandt to Leipzig to act in the Knauer case. The Knauer baby was probably killed with a lethal dose of the barbituate Luminal-perhaps the first genocidal extermination in the Reich.

I sought the darkest recess of a storage building, glass shards crunching underfoot. I halted and lit a single wooden match. The match flared and burned slowly down. I pinched it tightly as the flame began to sear my thumb and forefinger.  After the flame burned out against my skin, I carefully set the intact curl of ash on an overturned table and walked toward the light.

On the evening of November 19, 2005, a white taxi caught the attention of the United States Marines of Kilo company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. They were angry and on edge. A roadside bombing at 7:15 that morning had killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas. The Marines opened fire on the taxi killing five people who later proved to be four students from the nearby Technical Institute and taxi driver Ahmed Khidher. Then the Marines reported receiving small-arms fire. They suspected it came from nearby houses. Nine-year-old survivor Iman Walid witnessed what happened next. "I couldn't see their faces very well-only their guns sticking in the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest, then in the head. Then they killed my grandmother." Iman's grandfather, Abdul Hamid Ali, was 76. The twelve Marines then went from house to house and killed three entire families. Nineteen bodies, including five children under the age of six, were taken to the Haditha hospital just before midnight. Much later, after the cover-up collapsed, Marine investigators officially concluded that the causes of death were "well-aimed shots to the head and chest."

I stood in the headquarters of Marine Aircraft Group 11.  I didn't change a thing, just took a photograph. But later in Photoshop, I moved in on the rigidly upright Marine on the foyer wall and removed all but a hint of the bulge in his crotch.

The Persian armies moved into the eastern Roman Empire in 226. "Shapur I occupied and devastated the whole of Syria," related a Persian historian of the time. "He captured Antioch the Great in the evening and plundered it, tormented it, and set it on fire. All the places in the neighborhood were burned and laid to waste. We led away into captivity men from the Empire of the Romans." The Persians took Cilicia, Alexandretta, Rhosus, Anazarbus, Nicopolis and put them to the torch. Referencing the lost histories of Petrus Patricius, Zonaras described the Roman response. "While the situation so favored the Persians, they spread out over all the east subject to Rome and plundered it without fear. The Romans, however, in their flight appointed as their general one Callistus. . . He saw that the Persians were spread out and attacking the lands without anyone facing up to them. He launched a sudden attack on them and completed a very great slaughter of the barbarians." Retreating along the Euphrates River, Shapur and the Persian army came to an impassable gorge. Shapur ordered the Roman prisoners brought forward. One after another they were butchered and their bodies thrown into the gorge. When its depth was filled, the Persian army marched across the valley on a bridge of corpses.

I found a twig and dug through the soil beside a padlocked building with a single broken window. The dirt was oil-soaked and most of the stones were stained and chipped. Eventually, I exhumed a perfectly smooth stone, creamy white.  I balanced it in the broken window in front of the low sun. The severe backlighting transformed the white stone into pure black.

Confederate forces captured Bernard McKnight at the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana in the spring of 1863, McKnight was a 25-year-old Irish immigrant with a wife and child in Taunton, Massachusetts. He was sent to Andersonville Prison, Georgia. Starvation, epidemics, deprivation, and wanton cruelty beset the prison, a 27-acre stockade eventually packed with 33,000 Union prisoners. McKnight developed starvation scurvy. His gums softened and bled. His teeth began to fall out, and his muscles atrophied. Just past noon on August 9, 1864, a violent thunderstorm wracked the camp. "Dawn of August 10 revealed a pitiful sight," wrote a survivor. "The storm had punished many a failing soldier beyond recovery; the sickest of those who slept in the streets could not raise themselves to make way for the day's traffic, and numbers of them died under the driving rain." Over the course of 13 months, 13,737 Andersonville prisoners perished. Bernard McKnight was one of 107 fatalities on August 10, 1864. His friends stripped the body and attached a toe tag indicating name and unit, the Massachusetts 41st Infantry. They carried his body to the stockade gate. Bernard McKnight was buried 1,500 feet outside the prison wall in grave number 5223.

An unknown soldier had painted scores of rectangular objects near the old guard towers. I had been by the spot many times. The scatter of overspray looked like little coffins. A storm had set in and the asphalt was wet and black. I picked a worn stone and set it inside a ghost shape.

"I dropped in to a mid-day show," wrote the historian Seneca in 40 A.D. "It was pure murder. One man wins a fight, but is slaughtered immediately in the next. The winner is sent against another man to be butchered. It is a round-robin of death." The carnage at the Roman Coliseum was without rules or referees. The combat was desperate and savage. "The audience calls for the victorious fighter to be thrown to other killers in turn, and send the victor back into the ring for yet another fight. Death is the fighter's only exit." After each combat on that mid-afternoon in 40 A.D., men dressed as the mythical Etruscan demon Charun ran out and applied red-hot irons to the fallen. They slashed the throats of the fighters who feigned death. Seneca, philosopher and writer, watched as men in the costume of Mercury-transporter of the dead-cleared bodies from the arena and young boys ran forth and cleaned bloodstains from the sand. The next fighters entered and the crowd cheered for death.

I knelt beside a shallow pool of rainwater beside a building slated for destruction. The inside was already gutted and the doors were open. I lowered my camera. When the lower right corner touched the water, I flicked a tiny stone into the water.

"The Spaniards with their Horses, their Speares and Lances, began to commit murders and strange cruelties: they entred into Townes, Borowes, and Villages, sparing neither children nor old men, neither women with childe, neither them that lay in, but that they ripped their bellies, and cut them in peeces, as if they had beene opening of Lambes shut up in their fold. They laid wagers with such as with one thrust of a sword would paunch or bowell a man in the middest, or with one blow of a sword would most readily and most deliverly cut off his head, or that would best pierce his entrals at one stroake. They tooke the little soules by the heeles, ramping them from the mothers dugges, and crushed their heads against the clifts."

-The account of Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican missionary who took part in the conquest of Cuba in 1513.

I went to the upper floor of one of the hangers at sunset and worked my way through the dark inner hallways to the southwest corner. I scratched a small x into the tinted window. I knelt down and aimed my camera through the streaked glass, past the steel frames, beyond the braced cross trusses and up into the heavens.

A raw north wind drove dense falling snow across the 180 Cheyenne lodges during the night. Though he stayed up late that night—November 26, 1868—Black Kettle awoke the next morning before dawn. He stepped outside. A heavy fog hung in the valley of the Washita and he could see deep, drifted snow on the ridges across the river. A bugle blared out of the fog, then the shouts of charging soldiers. His wife came running with his horse. The deep snow muffled the hoofbeats. Black Kettle heard only the jingle of harness metal, the screams of a Cheyenne woman, and bugles everywhere. Custer brought his military band through the snow and ordered them to play Garry Owen for the charge. Black Kettle reached for his wife's hand and pulled her up on the horse behind him. They were almost to the ford of the Washita when cavalrymen in heavy blue coats and fur hats came out of the fog. A bullet ripped into his stomach. The horse swerved. Another bullet caught him in the back and spun him into the snow at the river's edge. Bullets tore his wife from the horse and into the water. The cavalrymen charged across the ford and over the bodies of Black Kettle and his wife.

The grasses came up with the early winter rains, but then the rain stopped. By March, the stunted grasses—still green but only a few inches tall in the continuing drought-were desperately growing seed heads before the parching summer set in. I knelt in the richest stand. I gently bent over the two tallest stalks.

Osman Arbab lived with her five young children in the village of Jebel Si, Darfur. You can look it up on Google Earth. It's in a broad wadi a little south of the main road between El Fasher and Abéché. It also happens to be the site of the ancient walled city of Jebel Si, fought over in wars between the Kera, Tungar, Musaabat, and Kungara tribes and finally destroyed by Suleiman II in the 1680s. Osman's brother Zakaria was there when the village was attacked in 2004. "First they dropped bombs from a plane, then the soldiers came. They killed 200 in a few hours, including many children." The soldiers slaughtered Osman and her children in the dust in front of their small hut. "Then they raped the girls who were left. They threw some bodies on the fire, others into the well."

Signs still demanded high clearance and issued threats, but I walked unhindered through hallways choked with fallen debris. The steel door of the massive walk-in safe was ajar, the doorway sealed only with dusty plastic. I brought in a downy feather from outside under the pine trees. I tore a small hole in the plastic and floated the feather into the empty steel vault.

Magomed Gaitaev was retired and lived alone. He was tidy, his neighbors say, always doing something at his house at 142 Mazaeva Street in the quiet residential suburb of Aldi. He would be out raking leaves in the yard, tending his fruit trees, painting the fence, making sure the gate swung well. At 11:00 on February 5, 2000, the Russian government sent soldiers—contract soldiers, hired mercenaries—into Aldi, a suburb of 27,000 people on the southwest edge of the Chechen capital of Grozny. A windstorm two days earlier had damaged Magomed's roof. He put on his leather work gloves and went into the yard. The soldiers began by shooting off the lower half of his face. He fell beside the gate. The soldiers killed at least sixty people that day, the oldest an 82-year-old grandmother named Rakat Akhmadova and the youngest one-year-old Khassan Estamirov. After the soldiers left, people returned to the streets. "At Mazaeva 142, I saw 72-year-old Magomed Gaitaev's body. His glasses were hanging on a fence. He was lying in a pool of blood. A dog was licking the blood."

I carry keys that will open almost any building at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. I tried all my keys twice, but none would open the padlock on the control vault. In Photoshop, I modified the photograph: not the padlock, not even the image of the padlock, but the image of the shadow of the padlock. In the shadow world, the lock hangs wide open.

Photo

Photo Summary

Unlimited access to the largest closed military base in the U.S. made me face the evidence—humanity’s unending violence. Which is how I became a mortality tourist.