There’s an eerie silence settling over our Forward Operating Base. The generators are shutting down one by one, and every night there are fewer lights.

The hundreds of people that made the base a cozy, bustling, American outpost have left, taking their equipment with them, leaving only abandoned buildings. Our unit is the last out, manning the guard towers, defending a quiet shell. In a few days, we’ll turn the lights out at our command post, our battalion commander will make a short speech and shake hands with an Iraqi general, and we’ll get in our waiting trucks and drive away.

Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press

Until that time, we have the place to ourselves. Or we would, if it weren’t for the imagined presences that haunt any place that was once alive, but is now deserted and quiet.

The F.O.B. has long been a military place. The buildings at its core were built by the British, and after that it was used and enlarged by the Iraqi Army. They both left their mark, but for reasons of historical analogy the British remnants are more poignant. For in this moment of stillness at the end of our tour, there is a natural opportunity for reflection on our collective mark here.

In a strange way, the process of withdrawal seems calculated to erase all traces of our presence. For months, earth movers filled the excavations that supplied the earth for our HESCO barrier ramparts and leveled the berms that compartmentalized the base into sheltered portions, resulting in flattened, featureless expanses.

Crews of Iraqis and American soldiers subsequently went foot by foot, picking up every piece of garbage. We’ve been directed to paint over any English words, and years of obscene scrawls, meticulous artwork, utilitarian signs, and forgotten meanings have dutifully been spray-painted. The smell of burning garbage, part of the normal sensory background of Iraqi life, is now in the pungent forefront as maps, CDs, and generally every last scrap of paper is burnt en masse. Entire buildings have been deconstructed down to their concrete pad foundations, put in shipping containers and driven away.

The Army term for this is “sterilization,” which is fairly apt. The running, pessimistic assumption is that the Iraqis will loot and despoil the place when we hand it over, but we are bound and determined that no one will be able to say that we left the mess.

This self-erasure seems like an instinctive part of American “imperialism.” For most of our soldiers, the gulf between Iraqi and American has been too wide to bridge; there is distaste for the Iraqi way of doing things, and all to often the corruption and self-interest of Iraqi leadership disappoints an institution built on stronger values. The military has been reluctant to implant and implicate itself into the often hostile culture, and at the lower levels our relationships with Iraqis are superficial and mercantile, to the mutual appreciation of both sides.

The ambivalence is now manifested physically as we scrape away at our material traces, relieving the Iraqis of American contamination just as we scrupulously clean our own equipment and inspect our baggage to defend against Iraqi impurities. Our aspirations were never to integrate and settle, but rather to separate and leave. We’ve staked no claims, built no enduring monuments. A thousand years hence, archaeologists will know of our presence only by a few blast wall monoliths and a thin strata of M.R.E. wrappers, as prosaic as pottery shards.

What have we done here? The frustration for soldiers on patrol is that success is often defined by what hasn’t happened. What violence hasn’t occurred, what bomb did not go off. Which often comes down to, the more boring things are, the more successful we are. Which is not why young men volunteer to join the infantry at a time of war.

Frustration aside, our unit has been successful. Violence has been sporadic, the elections were quiet and well-attended. Those elections might be our most lasting impact; Iraqi democracy the greatest improvement that we have presided over. If it persists, it will be worth more than any architectural remnants, any quantity of graffiti, or any amount of landscaping. The accomplishment is tenuous, however, as the dusty and deserted British buildings quietly remind us of the latest attempt to foster some sort of democracy.

I hope that the analogy does not hold. At the entrance to our headquarters there hung pictures of the dozens of soldiers who died in the surrounding area over the years. The wall is blank and painted over now, but their presence, mixed with all the other echos of sacrifice and activity, demands that what they gave was worth it.

It is unfortunate that we often turn to consider our legacy at the end, when it is difficult to change it. Our unit’s die is cast in Iraq; our ability to influence the outcome has dissolved away. We have done our best; the future will tell if the cost was worth the expenditure. The only unsettling thought is that the future is almost entirely in Iraqi hands.

This evening, as I walked to my barracks, I noticed another generator had shut down. And in the resulting quiet, the sunset call to prayer seemed that much louder, insistent, and haunting.

Capt. Eric Rudie is a Company Executive Officer in a Stryker brigade based north of Baghdad. The name of the base has been withheld to avoid jeopardizing service members still operating in that area. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the United States government. We welcome your comments. If you are an active-duty service member and would like to submit a post, please e-mail us at AtWar@nytimes.com.