Once again I am revisiting a period of my life from over 30 years ago. As a soldier in the Israeli army we found ourselves on constant occasions in the desert in the midst of maneuvers. Much to my dismay and despair tons of garbage and spent debris would be abandoned and discarded as we moved from one spot to another. Sometimes we’d encounter piles that looked like ancient heaps of rubble, rusted and unrecognizable . Who know how long they had been sitting there? Someone once found an old hand grenade, probably from WWII.
I, on the other hand, set my sites on more mundane objects. An admirer of Marcel Duchamp, the father of found art, I was fascinated with the old rusted K-ration cans that littered the fields probably dating back to years of soldiers eating on the move. To others they were nothing more than disintegrating garbage but to me they were absolutely beautiful. I would collect them whenever I could, stuffing them into my ammunition belts, packs every open pocket I could find. Rattling cans make a lot of noise. So much for moving in stealth and maintaining an element of surprise.
You can still see the sands of the Negev and Sinai in the can crevices.
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