"Your Mother Wears Combat Boots"

“Your Mother Wears Combat Boots”
Sefira Bell-Masterson

Sefira entered wearing military fatigues and boots. She removed the jacket and pulled the pants to her ankles and laid down on the floor on her back. She began doing sit ups. Each time she rose into sit up position she wrote “army strong” in black pen on her skin. She repeated this 1769 times – the number of days the United States had been engaged in the war in Iraq, ultimately covering her body with writing.

The United States has been engaged in combat operations in Iraq for longer than we were involved in World War II. Without a draft, our volunteers soldiers must serve longer tours of duty and face multiple redeployments, leaving them physically and psychologically exhausted. I chose to use the army’s motto “army strong” as a means of accessing and communicating this experience. As I did sit up after sit up and my body increasingly became covered in ink I became physically exhausted - I was barely able to raise my head or my hand. The physical breakdown of my body mirrored the literally and figurative deterioration of our military as well as the deterioration of morale in the United States as a whole.