Soldiers told stories in troop ship graffiti - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Soldiers told stories in troop ship graffiti

Naval records show that the troop ship General Nelson M. Walker had a comparatively uneventful career from its commissioning in 1945 to its scrapping in 2005. But the ship itself — its racks, its bulkheads, its fittings, all covered with graffiti from the troops it carried off to war — told a different story.

A sample of that graffiti, revealing the thoughts of the soldiers, sailors and Marines aboard the Walker killing time en route to Vietnam, is on display at the Navy Memorial in downtown Washington D.C.

For “Marking Time,” curators installed a set of the original metal-and-canvas racks (or bunks, as ground-pounders call them) covered with Vietnam-era pen and marker inscriptions. As they lay in bed, troops wrote their names, drew pictures and philosophized on the bottom of the racks above them, and also on virtually every other surface aboard the ship.

“You’re the one who must decide who’s to live and who’s to die,” says one inscription. “L.S.D. all the way,” says another. “George Washington slept here,” one wag wrote.

“The politics, the sex, the drugs, the love-ins, everything is there from the 60s,” said military artifact historian Art Beltrone, a former Marine who pulled together the graffiti exhibit. “There’s a whole era we grew up through that people don’t remember.”

Beltrone stumbled upon the Walker’s trove of vandalism in 1998, when he went aboard the then-mothballed ship with a friend who was researching troop ships to design a set for the movie “The Thin Red Line.”

They discovered how expressive young draftees could be when they were stuck for weeks at a time with nothing to do: There are cartoons, musings and profane drawings. Just about everyone who wrote anything wrote “ETS,” Beltrone said along with a date, for “estimated time of service.”

“No sooner had they gotten aboard the ship than they were putting down a date for when they’d get off.”

DISCUSS: The General Nelson M. Walker