Tintin at War

Again. Which makes us look really bad for like, putting one post up every six days. (But seriously, it's snowing here!) This one's a little, uh, lighter than the last one. (That could go for the snow, too; just ask Jim Kosek, who is awesome, about the weekend's storm.)

Like many who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have come to consider latrine graffiti as something of an art form — the only interesting entertainment to be found on many dismal patrol bases and outposts.

When I seat myself in a latrine and find that some arm of the military powers-that- be — a local contractor, a junior officer, I don’t really know — have spray-painted over the crude art that I so enjoy, I feel a bit frustrated. What else, after all, am I supposed to read in the cubicle? What other character does a largely prefabricated combat outpost have?

I first encountered latrine graffiti on my way north to Baghdad in the summer of 2007, at the Kuwaiti purgatory called Ali al-Salem Air Base. Odor aside, what I noticed was the vivid obscenity of the things scrawled there. Words were everywhere — poetry, rap, curses, illegible scribblings.

But what the eye jumped to were the drawings: huge, extraordinarily explicit pornographic drawings. Fifteen-month tours in a war zone devoid of Internet pornography, it appeared, brought out the artist in many soldiers. Evidence, I suppose, that for all the millions of dollars spent on it, training cultural sensitivity to traditional Muslim mores into American servicemen of the YouTube generation is something of a Sisyphean task.

Click the link to go see some Chuck Norris goodness with your own eyes. (No, there are no examples of the "huge, extraordinarily explicit pornographic" form, you sicko. (And to echo Starbuck's lament, now we're going to have a whole bunch of weirdos googling "Iraq pornography" and ending up on our site. Awesome. Thanks, Wes!))