Instead of their girlfriends' names, young marines seek apocalyptic images of death in tattoo parlours, writes Patricia Danaher, in Los Angeles. It says much about their state of mind

Twentynine Palms is a desert town 200 miles east of Los Angeles. Its fortunes are largely tied in with the enormous US Marine Corps base which lies on the outskirts of the town, but whose presence informs most things there. It is a dull place with no book shop or cinema. There is one bar, called Stumps, where you must be 23 before you can buy a drink, and there are several marine barber shops. The place feels dead and depressed.

The only sector of Twentynine Palms where there is any semblance of life are the town's 11 tattoo parlours, which are the most numerous and visible of any business in town. These are where the marines spend hours having elaborate tattoos inked on their skin and where, during the long hours that this takes, they most often open up and talk about their feelings about the war in Iraq.

Joan Remo runs the Ink Bomb tattoo parlour and grew up in Twentynine Palms. She says it often feels like a confessional in her shop, as though the intimate and lengthy procedure of getting a large tattoo makes the men more open to confide.

"Anyone coming in here now, they've all been to Iraq or Afghanistan multiple times by this," she says. "The tours of duty used to be shorter, but now they're longer and they seem to be going back more often. You spend so long working on these tats, the guys are often glad to tell you things that have gone on over there. If it helps them by listening, what are you going to do?"

The tattoos she is being asked for now, she believes, reflect how badly things are going and how pessimistic even the marines have become.

Recently, there has been a growing trend of marines getting memorial tattoos and agreeing pacts with each other to get the same tattoo or promising to have each other's names tattooed on them, should one of them fail to come back.

"They usually went for more personal stuff about girlfriends and sports, but these are like photos or reminders of them escaping from death."

In the shop, a young tattoo artist was outlining a field of headstones on one young marine's back, some with names on them, others left blank. It will take about 20 hours to complete the tattoo and the marine is pretty specific about what he wants the tattoo to reveal.

"It's the least I can do," the 22-year-old marine from Utah, who does not want to be identified, tells me. "Ten of my friends fell in this bombing in Fallujah last December. I was just lucky, I guess you could say, but my regiment came on the scene just after it had happened. All I'll tell you is, that's something you should never see, no one should."

Gravestones and apocalyptic images of car bombs, abandoned boots and fields of military crosses are the requests du jour of the young marines in the other tattoo parlours of Twentynine Palms also. It is as though so many of them are resigned to either not coming back or to watching their friends die in a war supported by fewer and fewer of their countrymen.

"I truly worry for these guys in the future, even if they do make it back alive," says Greg Hande, who manages Atomic Tattoo. "There's always been a tradition of military guys getting tattoos, but even I'm a bit chilled by what they're asking to have done these days. It's like they've looked death in the eye already and they're haunted."

It takes several visits to Atomic Tattoo before anyone will open up and talk, but then they will do so only anonymously, although the ones who will agree to be photographed won't make any comment.

Jed is a 22-year-old marine from Nebraska, who has been on four tours of duty to Iraq so far. He was having new names of dead colleagues added to the list of those on his arm. He knows at least 15 colleagues who have died there and dozens who are permanently maimed.

"What can you do? We all signed up for the money, to buy a house or clear debts, but it feels like we're on a road to nowhere. It's all so f**ked up, but we all say that the least we can do is remember each other," he says.

Jed had a pact with his company that they would each keep adding names to their lists, so that there would be some memorial to what they had sacrificed.

Someone else has brought in a design of a tattoo which his regiment has agreed they will all get. It's a crude mixture of explosions and a version of the soldier's battle cross; a half cross, half skeleton arrangement with a helmet on top of the rifle, jammed near the empty boots, with dog tags identifying the company hanging down.

It all seems to be about memory and an attempt to make sense of something senseless, even to some of the hardest men in military life. While happy to talk, no one wants to openly criticise what they are engaged in, or to be seen to undermine each other.

"We knew what we were getting into when we signed up, I suppose," says another colleague. "Just didn't think it was gonna take this long."

"Twentynine Palms is such a boring place, as you've seen for yourself," jokes Jed. "It's nearly a relief to get to Iraq!"

Everything in Twentynine Palms is touched by the presence of the marine base. Even the graffiti on the door of the women's toilets contains several RIPs for numerous marines who did not make it back.

Looking at the tattoos and listening to the gung-ho patriotism, it is like a Waltzing Matilda-type chronicle being foretold. But the US has an atrocious recent record of caring for its veterans and helping them to re-integrate into civilian life. One third of the homeless population here are veterans. Already on the streets in Boston and New York, some amputees and homeless veterans from these military adventures can be seen begging.

It's a far cry from the famous marines slogan, "once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will soon follow", unless these memorial tattoos are to be read as an inversion of this usual bravado. The death toll among the American military forces is approaching 3,000 in Iraq and rising daily, and there is no apparent end in sight to this war.

Cecelia Landon is a sociologist in LA, who works with veterans' families. "It's pretty clear that these men know they are being used. They won't or can't say this openly, but these tattoos are speaking volumes about the desperation and fear which even the marines are feeling," she says. "Frankly, I find it scary to contemplate these guys quite literally lying nightly on the names of their fallen buddies - vowing, as they have, never to forget them. How can we even begin to prepare as a society for the unimaginable psychological toll this war has taken on these young men?"

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a veteran of the first Gulf War. He used his military skills to construct and plant a massive bomb which killed 168 people in Oklahoma city. His reasoning for this was somewhat jumbled, but his aptitude as a killer was spot on.

"The tattoos are permanent marks on the outsides of the marines' bodies. They represent some kind of permanent change which has taken place inside them," says Landon.

"They are obviously very young men with little or no life experience outside where they come from and where the military has sent them. Frankly, most of them by now have seen the most appalling death and destruction - that's in no way to justify or excuse the war, but I really worry about the social consequences in the US, especially when many of those who are not career military try to integrate what they've seen and done when they're back in civilian life."

For now, the principal form of expression of what they've seen is imprinted on their skins, in scenarios which are both traumatic and exuberant. In memorialising their experience, these tattoos are a prompt both for stories and for silence.