Thousands of retired military aircraft are stored in the dry Arizona desert at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where the climate slows corrosion and makes long-term storage possible. The aircraft span decades of American military history, from Cold War bombers to planes associated with the Vietnam War. Among them were C-123 aircraft used to spray Agent Orange over Southeast Asia, connecting this vast landscape of obsolete technology to the human and environmental consequences of the conflicts in which the aircraft served.

I have returned to the airplane graveyard in Arizona several times, beginning in 1989. At first the sheer scale of thousands of obsolete military aircraft was what drew me back. Over time, researching individual planes—rather than seeing them simply as extraordinary objects—connected the landscape to the wars, policies and people those aircraft had once served.