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This installation transforms a mundane artifact of consumer culture, the receipt, into a towering ledger of war. Each one is a 250-foot roll, unfurling from flag poles to the floor. Printed along its length is an itemized list of U.S. military weapons, vehicles, and equipment purchased and left behind in Afghanistan. From the first invasion in 2001 to the final withdrawal in 2021, it tracks the accumulation, and the abandonment, of over two decades of militarized logistics.

The scale is not symbolic. It is literal. These receipts record more than seven billion dollars' worth of gear once transferred to Afghan forces. Over 300,000 rifles. 25,000 grenade launchers. 64,000 machine guns. Biometric scanners. Surveillance tools. According to U.S. Government Accountability Office reports, much of it was later seized by the Taliban after the Afghan government collapsed.

Between the lines of transactions, ruptures appear. Fragments. Interruptions. A LEDGER OF WAR AND LOSS. THIS IS NOT A RECORD, IT IS A WOUND. WE COUNT THINGS, NOT CONSEQUENCES. They cut through the bureaucracy, naming what cannot be tallied, refusing the clean erasure of numbers.

As a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, I cannot look at these receipts without feeling the invisible costs beneath the totals. Each line item marks not just equipment, but time. Memory. Loss. What is recorded is incomplete. The deeper cost, in lives, in trust, in purpose, remains outside the ledger.

This work is a meditation on accountability, and on the legacy that military infrastructure leaves behind. It asks what it means to walk away from not only a war, but from the tools, the trauma, and the unanswered questions that remain.

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