The war on the walls
From Thursday's Globe and Mail November 29, 2007 at 8:52 AM EST GRAEME SMITH
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The featureless landscape of Kandahar Air Field has few creative outlets. So when janitors stopped painting over bathroom graffiti, the stalls became a free-for-all forum for the feuds, frustrations, misgivings and longings of soldiers in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Kandahar Air Field can be terribly colourless. Sometimes there just isn't any chromatic variation: When a dust storm rolls in from the flatlands and coats every surface, people blend like dun chameleons into the background of beige tents, beige fences and beige razor-wire.
The colourlessness can be figurative, too. Some soldiers say they prefer to live a rougher life in forward bases rather than endure KAF's blandness and strict adherence to many rules.
Maybe that's why the troops reacted enthusiastically to a small change in janitorial policy this summer, when NATO contractors took the maintenance job from a U.S. company. The previous janitors had regularly painted over the graffiti in the bathroom stalls, leaving them as blank as everything else in this featureless landscape.
The new cleaners have shown more tolerance, allowing months' worth of scribbles to accumulate on the walls. This resulted in a kind of raucous creativity never witnessed since Canadian troops arrived at KAF. Some of the graffiti is the kind of crude stuff you might expect from thousands of young men who spend months inside a dirty ring of fences, but other bits of commentary and artwork go far beyond the usual bathroom humour.
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From Thursday's Globe and Mail November 29, 2007 at 8:52 AM EST GRAEME SMITH
Article Link
The featureless landscape of Kandahar Air Field has few creative outlets. So when janitors stopped painting over bathroom graffiti, the stalls became a free-for-all forum for the feuds, frustrations, misgivings and longings of soldiers in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Kandahar Air Field can be terribly colourless. Sometimes there just isn't any chromatic variation: When a dust storm rolls in from the flatlands and coats every surface, people blend like dun chameleons into the background of beige tents, beige fences and beige razor-wire.
The colourlessness can be figurative, too. Some soldiers say they prefer to live a rougher life in forward bases rather than endure KAF's blandness and strict adherence to many rules.
Maybe that's why the troops reacted enthusiastically to a small change in janitorial policy this summer, when NATO contractors took the maintenance job from a U.S. company. The previous janitors had regularly painted over the graffiti in the bathroom stalls, leaving them as blank as everything else in this featureless landscape.
The new cleaners have shown more tolerance, allowing months' worth of scribbles to accumulate on the walls. This resulted in a kind of raucous creativity never witnessed since Canadian troops arrived at KAF. Some of the graffiti is the kind of crude stuff you might expect from thousands of young men who spend months inside a dirty ring of fences, but other bits of commentary and artwork go far beyond the usual bathroom humour.
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please spare us the details.
