Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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.our primary focus is the technological development of aviation from balloons to outer space.
The expectation of commemoration is not just about patriotic ideas of respect for service members. Arguably, any act of reuse means reckoning not only with the pieces and materials an object is made of but also the lives they shaped and were shaped by, and the stories people tell about them, big and small. Like all reusers, the staff at ARM, Pima, and other surrounding enterprises can choose whether or not to attend to what James refers to as “the human connection” in practice, and to what extent. Because the objects they are reusing and remaking are associated with the military, their decisions and designs can have profound implications.
Let us say that you come across a military aircraft. You might reasonably wonder what branch of the military made use of it, which specific squadrons and individuals flew it, what battles it was used in, if any, and whether they were lost or won, whether anyone was killed or saved through its use, and so on. If you have insider knowledge, you might know to look at the fin flash or the squadron tail art to retrieve some of this information.11 All of these characteristics are part of its history of use and may be detected by searching for features that resemble, indicate, and/or symbolize these historical connections in particular ways. The surface of a plane might reveal traces of past skirmishes or theaters of operation. This was mentioned in an interview with Carlo McCormick, an art critic who helped curate the Boneyard Project (about which more will be said below). When you are reusing old planes and come across bullet holes, you are particularly struck by what he called the “historical resonance” of the object. This is another way of saying that what is absent stands out as much as what is present before you. In fact, what is absent stands out precisely because of what is before you: symbols denoting a military vehicle and bullet holes indicating that a battle once took place. For Carlo, the presence of these signs only amplifies what is not there, the “resonance” of a history that happened and is now over, including the actual sweating bodies and fearful voices of the plane’s former crew.12 Such present absences can be ignored, in theory, if instead you want a plane to fly again, let alone drop bombs or fire bullets. In this case, you would need to know something about aeronautics, something about its design and makeup, and something about what it has been through. To begin, you would explore the object as best you could for signs that it can still perform as desired. You would also want to store them in such a way that they could be easily found for repair and reuse.
At the Boneyard, like any scrapyard, items are differentiated according to type, with fighters and bombers grouped together. Insofar as these types can be readily interpreted as resembling one another, their resemblance affords ease of storage and access for the repair crew. There are other divisions of the space of the Boneyard that facilitate its actions as a repair-scape. One section, known as “celebrity row,” is for those planes that could potentially return to service. In a different section they store those planes that are being stripped for parts or dismantled, which will never return to service. Even if Boneyard mechanics are unable to make a plane fly again or are uninterested in doing so, it still must be kept in a state such that its parts can be harvested as needed. Everything that comes in gets washed on what is known as “the wash rack,” which every base has. Even those items in storage that may be disposed of are routinely washed, sometimes three or four times a year, at the wash rack, though if items come in large enough numbers, this can prove difficult to manage, as happened with a group of C-130 Hercules, which were delivered recently and went unwashed. Planes at the Boneyard are further draped with plastic sheeting over the windows, nose, engine, and/or propellers, to protect the plane and its valuable components from the elements. The only nonmilitary plane at the Boneyard in the summer of 2015 was a commercial Boeing 707 that was acquired in order to strip its engines and put them into a KC-135. In general, there are about twice as many engines as aircraft on site, since the engines wear down faster than the planes themselves. That way, an engine is sitting waiting while another is in use, which helps maintain the engines over time.13
Unlike repairers, restorers will rely on some shared, yet arbitrary, understanding of what counts as “continuity” with a past, idealized state. This decision is arbitrary because making an object look like it did five minutes or five weeks ago might accurately depict a past state, and yet not count as “restoration.” Evidence of repair is seeing something work as it once did; evidence of restoration would be seeing something that seems like it once did. If this is about iconicity—about relations of resemblance between an ideal state and a current state—this resemblance is mediated by a specific, shared idea of what a restored plane is supposed to look like. That depends on conventions maintained by airplane museums and held by visitors. The important point is that if you only want a plane to seem like it did when it flew, you interpret its qualities differently and end up with a potentially very different object—the simulation of a plane rather than an actual flying machine. Items at the Pima are cleaned up, painted, and, when possible, labeled with the markings they had when they were still in use.
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