The sidearm-clad Army military police officer peered through the back window of my car, and Bella the Dog, my 110-pound Anatolian-Shepherd–Saint-Bernard hybrid, peered back at him from the rear seat. Bella had driven with me on this trip from Arkansas to Texas; on our way home, we were making a stop here, at Fort Sill in Oklahoma—the home of Army artillery—and Bella was all toothy smiles and slobber. “Cute dog,” another gate guard, this one a civilian, said with a smile, before waving me on. Later, more than 200 people would gather at this gate to protest the Trump administration’s decision last month to house up to 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children on the base.



At that moment, the vehicle checkpoint was a comfortable place for me: a reminder of a life spent driving on and off bases, first as an Air Force brat, then as a soldier in the Army’s infantry. I was mindful of my good fortune driving onto the post; unlike many who’d passed through these gates before me—and unlike the children who might soon follow—my dog and I could leave the post whenever I wanted.

I set off toward my destination, a cemetery on the north side of the base, a final resting place that never seemed very restful when I stopped in. To get there, I first drove toward the golf course, past the stone barracks of the “old post” and the parade ground, where there sits a rough boulder with a smooth, square-cut inscription that could not have been clearer on the base’s origins: “TO CONTROL TRIBES.”

Fort Sill is now where all United States soldiers and Marines in the artillery community, known since the time of Napoleon as “the King of Battle,” come to learn or hone their craft—that is, how to precisely fire massive cannons so their shells kill a far-off enemy that they can’t see. They learn how the King of Battle kills targets—people—based on guidance from forward observers. Approaching the cemetery, there is the distant, occasional percussion of small arms gunfire from the training ranges, and—depending on the day—an arrhythmic heartbeat of artillery thumps, the type that you can feel in your chest and sinuses as a small and thundery pressure differential.



On the map, the Beef Creek Apache Prisoner-of-War Cemetery—one of three Apache POW interment sites on the post—is tucked in between a helicopter landing zone and a rock dump, along a mosquito-filled waterway that flows down from the north Arbuckle Range, what the Army calls a “dudded artillery impact area”—an off-limits practice range where unexploded shells are presumed to remain stuck in the ground. On the road, the cemetery lies just past a sign that reads “Landfill & Rubble Pit, 1.5 miles.”