The Marine Base and the Desert Town

The fence you may notice along stretches of road near Twentynine Palms marks the edge of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, which covers roughly eleven hundred square miles of Mojave Desert. It is the largest Marine Corps installation in the United States by land area. Most of what it contains, the dry washes and basalt ridgelines and open desert flats, looks from the air identical to what surrounds Joshua Tree National Park. That is not a coincidence. The terrain is used for the same reason the park is named for what it contains: the desert is the thing.

The base was established in nineteen fifty-two. Through the years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it served as the primary training ground for Marine battalions rehearsing large-scale combined-arms operations before deployment. The desert terrain offered room to maneuver that no other Continental installation could provide.

The towns of Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley depend economically on the base in the way that garrison towns always depend on the installation nearby: the base is the employer, the commissary is the grocery store, the deployment cycle is the rhythm of civic life. The Joshua Tree visitor experience, which is oriented entirely toward the park's geology and ecology and cultural history, almost never acknowledges what is happening on the other side of the fence.

There is a population here that moves through the national park and the gateway communities in a cycle defined by deployment and return. They are not in the visitor center literature. They are in the town. The relationship between the base and the community that surrounds it, including the mental health consequences of repeated deployment, is a story that the desert holds but rarely tells to visitors passing through.