Generation Kill, Meet Bill - Mauldin, that is
By Jim Washburn
Corporate guys tell me that Outward Bound is an incredible bonding experience. They should try war. That charred smell isn’t s’mores, it’s human flesh. The horror, struggle, and boredom changes you in ways no one can understand unless they’ve shared it. That’s what everyone wants: some recognition, understanding, and compassion for the path they’ve walked. Life’s hard enough; life plus war is like going from the smelter to the forge. You become one tough, fucked-with ingot.
Some art captures that, while most that tries fails hugely. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket was a turgid turd of a war film; Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was an interesting tone poem; while Oliver Stone’s unartful Platoon was an effective gut-shot of a film because he’d been there.
Some novels nailed it, some pieces of music, but few things took you to war like Bill Mauldin’s cartoons, which appeared in the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes during World War II. His comics’ dogface protagonists, Willie and Joe – unkempt, bearded, less interested in their German enemy than in the hooch he’s carrying – became heroes to soldiers at the front, while Mauldin found he had to fight generals – Patton included – who tried to cancel his comics because of their perceived subversion and insubordination. Granted, cartoons showing infantrymen using a town’s liberation parade as cover to pelt their commanding officers with rotten fruit was subversion and insubordination.
I visited Mauldin in a Costa Mesa nursing home shortly before he died in 2003. He was in bad shape; you couldn’t tell if he saw, heard or understood anything. But, as other visitors did, I read letters to him, which arrived by the bagful from veterans. Few had met him, but they all thanked Mauldin for knowing them, because his bemused, absurd, angry cartoons had let them know someone recognized and understood them crouching in their reeking, rain-filled foxholes. One I read was from a war widow thanking Mauldin because her husband’s letters home, until they stopped coming, told her how Mauldin’s pen and ink drawings made life at the front bearable. All of his wartime cartoons are captured in a new two-volume set, Willie & Joe, the WWII Years (Fantagraphics Books), with an introduction and annotation by Todd DePastino, who has also penned a biography, Bill Mauldin, A Life Up Front (W.W. Norton). Mauldin grew up during the Depression in New Mexico and Arizona. He started smoking, Chesterfields, when he was three, and began drawing around the same time.
Sinatra didn’t become a great singer until his heart was broken, and Mauldin didn’t become a great cartoonist until the invasion of Sicily. There, along with the civilian dead in towns, he was witness to a horrific snafu where hundreds of U.S. paratroopers were killed by friendly fire, not that such an idiotic term existed then. Any gore or death was offstage in his cartoons, but his humor grew grimmer, his mud and zipping bullets more palpable. You can feel the rain and chill in the cartoon that won him the Pulitzer Prize: A news headline “Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, Battle-weary prisoners” is accompanied by his drawing of rain-soaked, exhausted, hangdog German prisoners, indistinguishable but for their uniforms from their sodden, exhausted, hangdog American captors.
Mauldin came home from the war a hero, with newspapers clamoring for his cartoons. That didn’t last long, after they found he didn’t like segregationists, McCarthyites and exploitive employers much more than he had the Nazis. When Chicago police fired 100 rounds into a Black Panther headquarters – killing two inside – Mauldin’s cartoon showed a hail of police bullets shooting a swastika pattern through the Panthers’ door. Like a lot of vets, he’d hoped to see more of the freedom he’d fought for.
I’ve been watching HBO’s Generation Kill. It’s good, but it feels more like a reality show than transformational art. Maybe that is the reality of the Iraq invasion – our first YouTube war – but you have this weird loop of actors playing Marines who it seems were acting too. Rattling along in their HumVees, they aren’t shy about spouting plenty of racist, fag-obsessed, pop-culture-packed, kill-happy repartee, but you get the sense everyone’s speaking in quotes because they know it’s being jotted down by an embedded reporter. There’s plenty of charred flesh, bleeding guts, and blown-up children here, but nothing that adds up to the hollow look in Willie and Joe’s eyes.
Published: 07/30/2008
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