The Graffiti of Kuwait's Latrines (Corrected)

Like me, Steven Featherstone walked into the latrines of the American military base in Kuwait, and was fascinated by what he read.  In those stalls, troops joke about race and sexuality, in the foulest terms possible. They vent about stop-loss, multiple tours and overpaid contractors. They scrawl love notes, and odes to Chuck Norris. And they dis their bosses, this war, and — naturally — one another. 

Unlike me, Featherstone "made a point of visiting every latrine trailer on base, squeezing into more than 100 stalls and shooting [pictures] in the dead of night to avoid suspicion." A selection of his bathroom catalogue appears in the current dead-tree edition of Walrus magazine.  The online edition, strangely, doesn’t share these pleasures. [Wrong, wrong, wrong. They’re up.] So Featherstone has been kind of enough to give us a few

exclusive shots.

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"It’s tempting to view these photographs as the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ voice of American soldiers. But that would be missing the point," Featherstone writes.

Graffiti is public by definition—it’s not a private confession. It’s a surface effect of something far broader and infinitely more complicated than what can be contained in a hastily scribbled line or two… a fleeting moment in a six-year-old war—nothing more. The words on these walls are snatches of an overheard and ongoing conversation that changes by the day, soldier’s talking to other soldiers at a time when soldiers are being asked to give more than they have been giving, which is already too much.

And here’s one of my favorite pictures from Kuwait’s stalls.  For some reason, I never bothered to post it before: