It's a canvas of sorts, one threaded through with blue veins, nasty bruises, an explosion of hatch-marks that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be scars. It's skin -- but that's just one layer of a story.
Laid over that, across the spread of a back, is an elaborate tattoo: A gun sunk into earth, a helmet resting on top, empty boots tossed alongside. Dog tags dangle from the sides, spelling out in bold uppercase "Never forget. " And lining the bottom of the image, the lower back, still red from the artist's needles, are 10 empty ammunition casings, with a roll call of surnames -- Martinez, Stevens, Watson . . . drifting out from the top, like spirits, or smoke.
It's easy to wince away from the rawness. But it engraves itself on your mind, especially when you learn that the tattoo is just one of many coming out of the tattoo parlors in Twentynine Palms, memorials to lost friends and family members often done before a second tour in Iraq or a third. Before he shipped out, Owen McNamara, the Marine with the "Never forget" on his back, had it inked around shrapnel from the blast that killed his 10 friends but somehow didn't kill him.
Artist Mary Beth Heffernan spent three months in Twentynine Palms photographing the Marines and their homages to the dead. She haunted tattoo parlors late-night, gaining the trust of various tattoo artists first and then the Marines who dashed in at the last minute, sometimes due to be deployed the next day -- who would be back in Iraq before their skin stopped weeping, before the ink was dry.
Oftentimes she shared closet-size spaces, or tiny cubicles set aside in larger rooms, at some points photographing with her knees butting up against the subject. "It was a very intense, physically close experience," she says, "like a cross between being in the exam room during a doctor's visit or a close moment between two friends." It was the quiet before the storm.
Heffernan says she steered her conversation away from hot-button topics, asking instead about family, where the Marines were from, how they knew their friends. The subject sometimes turned to the specifics of what they'd seen. "They really resent almost being pimped for information like that. I assumed that they maybe killed somebody in the act of duty. I assumed that they saw gruesome things."
