Gangs of Bagram?

Judging from the scene on the left, I had assumed that some sort of new gang activity was finding its way among the rank and file of the base and this was some sort of territorial marking. If The Wire has taught us anything, it's that you don't consider a pair of shoes on a wire a childhood prank. A street gang here would definitely make sense. They could even try to pull that American Gangster shit that Denzel did.


In reality, there's a tradition in the Army that if you had a bad tour, the disgruntled soldier is supposed to write "FTA" on his boots and fling his shoes onto a cable of some sort. If you can't figure out what FTA means, it stands for 'Fuck The Army'.